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That old school spirit
St. Benedict’s Prep’s all-star lineup is all hands on deck when it comes to helping Newark school prosper Inside the board Organization: St. Benedict’s Prep Founded: 1868 Organization mission: To prepare young men to fulfill their potential as emotionally mature, morally responsible and well-educated young men. The school is devoted to preparing boys in and around Newark, with a core philosophy of family, leadership and excellence. Board of Trustees William Connolly Jr. (chairman), William H. Connolly & Co. LLC Robert DiQuollo (vice chairman), Brinton Eaton Wealth Advisors Stephen Adubato Sr., North Ward Center Christopher Anton, Budd Larner P.C. Ronald Beit, RBH Group LLC Kenneth Boehl, MBNA America Bank N.A. (retired) Michael Caponiti, Archimedes Capital Raphael Caprio, Rutgers University Charles Cawley, MBNA Corp. (retired) Claude Coleman, Superior Court of New Jersey, Essex Vicinage (Retired) John Degnan, Port Authority of NY NJ David DeLorenzi, Gibbons P.C. Ronald Del Mauro, Saint Barnabas (retired) Jean Desravines, New Leaders Adrian Foley, Connell Foley LLP Brian Froelich, JBD Hotels Brian Kennedy, Goldman Sachs & Co. Al Koeppe, PSE&G and Bell Atlantic (retired) Dr. Robert Lahita, Newark Beth Israel Donald Laurie, Oyster International LLC Rev. Edwin Leahy, St. Benedict’s Carlos Lejnieks, Big Brothers Big Sisters Robert Marino, Horizon BCBS of NJ Jerome Matthews, Prudential Investment Management Inc. Patrick McCarthy, Day Pitney LLP Daniel McLaughlin, Willis HRH Peter Mocco, Liberty Harbor Harold Morrison Jr., Chubb Corp. Sharif Muhammad, Unlimited Financial Services, LLC Patrick Napoli, I-Partner Group Eugene O’Hara (chairman emeritus), Prudential Insurance Co. of America Dean O’Hare, Chubb Corp. (retired) Donald Robinson, Robinson, Wettre & Miller LLC John Saueracker (emeritus), National Westminster Bancorp NJ (retired) James Scarpone, Scarpone & Vargo LLC Rev. Boniface Treanor, St. Benedict’s Rt. Rev. Melvin Valvano, St. Benedict’s Hugh Weber, New Jersey Devils Ted Walsh III, WR Capital Partners, LLC Peter Wilderotter, Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation
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William H. Connolly Jr., president, William H, Connolly & Co. LLC, and board of trustees chairman at St. Benedict’s Preparatory School in Newark. –aaron houston By Joshua Burd
W
illiam Connolly Jr. recalls his father as a devout Catholic and “a tough guy” — a personality shaped in part by his days at St. Benedict’s Preparatory School in
Newark. That explains the elder Connolly’s love for the venerated school, his service on its board of trustees and his help in guiding it to sound financial footing after a one-year closure in the early 1970s. So it’s no surprise that, when he died suddenly in 1986, St. Benedict’s turned to his son. “They asked me to take his seat,” Connolly said, later adding: “I didn’t go here like almost half of the board members, but my dad did and grew up in Newark, so I knew of the school and had been taken in by the wonderful mission that it is and the people who are here.” It’s the same thing that appeals to many of the other successful, high-profile business leaders who serve on the St. Benedict’s board. With Connolly as its chair, the group supports an institution that is widely seen as a model of inner-city education, known for its rigorous curriculum and it philosophy of preparing students to lead themselves. NJBIZ spoke with Connolly, president of William H. Connolly & Co. LLC, a Montclair-based insurance and risk management firm, to discuss the board’s role at St. Benedict’s and the heavyweights who make up its roster. NJBIZ: As someone who has served on the board for so long, how would you explain its role, relative to the mission of St. Benedict’s? William Connolly Jr.: Everybody thinks their board is unique. Our board is significant in that it functions as a board to advise (the Rev. Edwin D. Leahy, headmaster) and the monks on vari-
ous issues relating to the running of the school. So we don’t get a whole lot into whether we need AP Chemistry or not, but we provide a lot of oversight in the areas that they have sort of helped us carve out for them: business oversight, finance, advancement. To the extent that we can be helpful in school life, whether it’s academic affairs or student life, we are. But we’re not like a single-purpose board, just raising money for one event or one issue. We’re not like some of the fiduciary boards or designed solely to raise money. Everybody here has a very real passion for this mission, these kids, because they are all individuals, but they resemble each other significantly from year to year to year and from even generation to generation. This mission, this city, this notion of the way a school can be run, which is different from most schools, that’s what’s appealing to us, and the support we give helps with that. NJBIZ: You alluded to the business acumen that runs up and down this board. Can you talk more about how that’s useful to the leadership of school? WC: Father Ed is very much like one of these charismatic business leaders, who is known for just coming up with ideas, spitting them out one after the other, and then having a crack team of people who will say, ‘Throw that one away’ or ‘That’s a pretty good idea — let’s look into it’ or ‘That’s fabulous — why didn’t we think of it? Let’s initiate it tomorrow.’ That’s sort of what life is like around here with Father Ed. He’s an idea a minute and you take the ones that sound like they could work and see if you could do something. And that’s where the board has been particularly useful, I think, in helping him make decisions on what’s doable, what’s not doable, what makes sense, other than from a spiritual or academic perspective. See st. benedict’s on page 17
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spotlight Power Boards st. benedict’s Continued from page 15
NJBIZ: Has the role of the board changed in your organization at any point? WC: The role of the board has evolved because the school has evolved. It was all about survival for the first 10 years. Remember, the school predates the Civil War, but it closed in 1972 for a year, and when it reopened, it was a shell of what it was. And it took probably a decade just to get people, particularly people in the community, a sense that it was going to be here after next year. So the role of the board then was very different from what it is today. As the school has grown and evolved and become a more complex place, the board has tried to stay in step with that. I would never say we’re out of step with Father Ed, but we’re not just reacting, either. We work with him. NJBIZ: What do you feel you’ve brought to the board and to the organization, personally? WC: I consider myself to be about 18th-smartest guy on the board. I’m definitely in the Top 20. The power of our board is if we are trying to deal with just life as a not-for-profit and the advancement side of it, Ron Del Mauro ran for decades the biggest not-for-profit organization in the state, Barnabas Health. He created the system, so he’s pretty tuned into what it takes to run a successful 501(c)(3) not-for-profit. Peter Wilderotter is the guy who runs the (Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation), so he’s pretty tuned into what life is like along those lines. If you need to deal with government or other big business types for whatever reason, guys like Al Koeppe and John Degnan — they’ve excelled in that world, they’re lions in that world. Al knows his way around Trenton, New Jersey and Washington as well as anybody in the state. Everybody who is on this board has passion, not for the board work, but for the place — for Father Ed, for the kids, for the institution that is St. Benedict’s.
“This mission, this city, this notion of the way a school can be run, which is different from most schools, that’s what’s appealing to us.” Everybody really has to care — that’s what makes this so special. And the fact that everybody has that in common is part of why guys get on well here. You could say Al is a good friend of mine or John is a good friend of mine, which is true because you instantly have a lot in common if you care about this mission, about what’s going on in Newark, about helping young people. It’s not that everybody is a saint or everybody is just about helping, but this place is easily identified by the passion that people have for it, and those people tend to have a lot of other things in common, so they become friendly.
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NJBIZ: You managed to talk about virtually everyone else — what about you? WC: My job here is to make sure that every one of the guys on this board is being utilized properly. … For every issue that we have here, we’ve got more than one or two board guys who have done it before. And many of them — a dozen or more of them — are well known to everybody around this state. If you talk to people about insurance or insuring hospitals, people know Connolly’s name. That’s not unlike a lot of other businesses and a lot of other boards. It’s just that people here tend to stay. They don’t come on, raise a little money, write a big check and then leave. They tend to stay because the mission is compelling. NJBIZ: In that case, it sounds like this is certainly a ‘power board’ — would you agree? WC: As a group, there are probably 15 or 18 of us here who know what time it is, know people around. If something comes up, one of us will know who we should talk to because it’s a little bit out of our depth or a little different from our realm. And with that core group of a dozen or so guys, you can get an awful lot of help here. It’s a team that’s been put together strategically. We could get more guys on. We don’t have a problem finding board members. It’s a place that people want to help — they see it on ‘60 Minutes’ or they hear about it, and when they come down and they meet guys like the people that I’ve just been talking about and they see how they’re involved, they buy in. E-mail to: joshb@njbiz.com
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