By Melyssa Allen

Meredith College Assistant Professor of History Michael McElreath has a new position this summer--serving as director of Governor's School East.

As director, McElreath is responsible for the overall program, duties that he describes as "everything from the safety of the students to seeing that the program holds to the values of the Governor's School vision first laid out when Governor Terry Sanford created [the program] in 1964."

North Carolina's Governor's School, the first program of its kind in the U.S., is now the largest Governor's School in the nation. The state now offers Governor's School East (GSE) at Meredith and Governor's School West at Salem College in Winston-Salem.

From June 17 through July 28, a group of 400 North Carolina high school students will study on the Meredith campus, which has hosted the program since 2000.

"As both a faculty member and the GSE director, I can say unequivocally that I cannot imagine a better place to be than Meredith," said McElreath, who joined the Meredith faculty in 2006.

Serving as director is not McElreath's first experience with Governor's School. He attended a similar program as a high school student in South Carolina, and has also worked in Governor's School programs in South Carolina and New Jersey. For the last three years he taught social sciences courses at GSE.

McElreath said he hopes to "continue the strong collaboration between Meredith and GSE." He credits Bill Brown, Meredith's liaison to GSE, with doing "a Herculean job and helps both the College and the program prosper."

" All the other folks at Meredith who work with us--from Campus Security, to the Library, to Health Services and many more--help to make GSE a success each summer."

For more information on Governor's School, visit http://www.ncgovschool.org/.