Quaker School Educator Nancy Fitts Donaldson Dies at 93

Nancy Fitts Donaldson, 93, of Newtown Square, a longtime Quaker school educator and the mother of Inquirer cartoonist Signe Wilkinson, died in her sleep on Thursday, Sept. 26, at White Horse Village.

Ms. Donaldson attended Quaker schools and later became a teacher, principal, and mentor to younger Quaker educators in schools throughout the Philadelphia region. Lynn Oberfield, a former head of Media-Providence Friends School, where Ms. Donaldson had been a student in the 1930s, described her in the winter 2011 issue of the school’s bulletin. “She was a careful thinker with long and deep perspective, who was always open to new learning,” Oberfield said.

Born Anna Mary Fitts in Gradyville, Delaware County, Ms. Donaldson did not like her first name and changed it to Nancy. She liked to recall growing up near a peach orchard. When she was 13, she and her sisters sold their father’s homemade peach ice cream on the side of Middletown Road in Gradyville for five cents a scoop, or 10 cents for two. In 1946, she graduated from Swarthmore College, where she was known as “Fittsy.”

Ms. Donaldson married Peter B. Wilkinson in the late 1940s. After living in Texas, Atlanta, and Pittsburgh, the couple settled in Paoli to raise three children. Their daughter Signe later became an Inquirer cartoonist who won the Pulitzer Prize for her work in 1992. Ms. Donaldson and her husband divorced in 1978. When her children were old enough to attend school, she returned to school as well and earned a teaching certificate in education from West Chester University.

In the late 1950s, she began her career as a fourth-grade teacher at the now-closed Paoli Pike Elementary School in West Chester. She then joined the Wilmington Friends School in Delaware and taught there until 1971, when she became head of Lansdowne Friends School. She later served as lower school principal at Abington Friends School and held the same role at the Shipley School in Bryn Mawr. She also supervised student teachers for Swarthmore College.

Throughout her career as a principal, Ms. Donaldson was in demand as an adviser and mentor in Quaker education circles. “She went from being a wonderful, trusted school leader to being a wonderful, trusted support for school leaders,” Oberfield said. Ms. Donaldson retired in 1990, and she volunteered on the boards of Friends’ Central School and Media-Providence Friends School. She was also the first clerk of the board of Stratford Friends School in Newtown Square, which specializes in teaching children with learning differences. She tutored pupils in the city of Chester and supported the Chester Children’s Choir.

In 1984, she married Orlin Willits Donaldson, a retired photographer for Bethlehem Steel Corp. The couple rented one of the tiny, ramshackle houses on old Forge Road in Ridley Creek State Park and, in exchange for nominal rent, rehabilitated the building. “He leveled the floors, she planted banks of daffodils and daylilies,” the family said. The couple traveled widely and enjoyed “dropping in on friends” in Maine and Nova Scotia.

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