Diversifying the School Community new era, new challenges by johnston smith '67
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n the last issue, I traced the history around the financial crisis which St. Paul’s faced from roughly 1964-1977. This crisis was rooted in the school’s not in a timely way realizing the full gain from the sale of its old property at Memorial and Ellice and was exacerbated by low enrolments. The debt and revenue problem was stabilized and then eliminated through the efforts of a group of dedicated supporters of St. Paul’s under the dogged leadership of Rev. Joseph Driscoll, S.J., head of school from 1966-1972. The story of how the school grew its enrolment continues here.
committee on change In 1967 the school graduated 59 students. Only a handful of these were not Catholic (I know this because this was my year!) and the class included the only visible minority student in the whole school. In 1975, of the 66 graduates 7 were visible minorities. By the 1980s, the “face” of the student body had changed considerably. Why this change? Just as the drive to make the school financially solvent was driven by the local community (with the support, of course, of Fr. Driscoll and the Principal, Fr. St. Clare A. Monaghan, S.J.) so was the drive to increase enrolment. The first initiative involved the Winnipeg-area Catholic elementary students. Lay teachers such as Nick Laping and George Dawson in 1968 began visiting Catholic grade eight classes to talk about the benefits of a SPHS education. They were soon joined by committed parents such as Lorne and Martha Evans as the program expanded to actual parishes, including those without schools. On a Sunday, one of the Jesuits would say Mass and a parent or teacher would talk about the school to mass attenders. George Dawson recalls, “Athletics were a great attraction. We even let students who had not yet reapplied attend Crusader football tryouts before school opened and Fr. Monaghan would come out and encourage them to re-enroll.” Another change started in 1970 with the arrival of Asian students, mostly from Hong Kong but latterly from Korea and Malaysia. It seems that there was no active recruitment on the school’s part of these students, who mostly came for Grade 11 and 12, but some students of the day believe that it was word-of-mouth from local people of Asian background encouraging their relatives to send their older sons here for a good education that would improve their English skills. But one of the greatest contributions to the school’s growing diversity came from the support of Winnipeg’s Jewish community. On the school’s Board in that crucial Driscoll period were Jerry Feigelman, a noted businessman and Sol Kanee, a prominent lawyer and president of the Canadian Jewish Congress. Fr. Obrigewitsch observes, “The Jewish
community connected with the Catholic community over their common desire for some measure of provincial support for their faith-based schools.” Another probable factor was that, at that time, Tuxedo was the neighbourhood of many Jewish families. Stephen Rosenfield ’72 believes that there were two kinds of Jewish boys attracted to St. Paul’s. “The first were the very bright guys attracted by the first-class education. For example, my friend Peter Druxerman won the Governor-General’s Gold Medal in 1971.” With a wry smile, he continued, “I was one of the other sort: guys for whom the public schools were just not working. For me, St. Paul’s was a place I felt I truly belonged. I was a person at St. Paul’s while at my old public school I had felt like a number.” The advent of more non-Catholic students spurred the school to look at its curriculum. The school’s religion program had remained much the same as it had been for the decades when the school was overwhelmingly Catholic. Rev. Eric Jensen, S.J., taught English and religion during the seventies and early eighties. He recalls, “When I arrived in 1974, only the Catholic students took it [religion] and were seen as using it to pull up their marks. The nonCatholic students did not take it and so got free study periods (which the others saw as helping them pull up their marks). I believe it was Pedro Arrupe (then the General Superior of the Jesuits) who suggested to the principal that we focus on values. Thus, was born the Values Department, with courses which everyone had to take and for which they got not marks but a letter grade (without that grade they could not get a report card or graduate). The courses involved Old Testament stories in Grade 9 (Joseph and his brothers, etc.), New Testament (Gospels and Acts) in Grade 10, and moral and social values courses in 11 and 12. The lay staff were also involved in the teaching, and not just the Jesuits.” This created a program which all students could take, a program which was responsive to the spirit of the Vatican Council’s stress on interfaith dialogue. It also removed a very visible division between the schools Catholic and non-Catholic students. This innovation also saw the beginning of the Christian Service Program which over the ensuring decades grew to be a fundamental and compulsory aspect of the school’s goal to create “Men for and with Others.” But in 1973, enrolment was still “touch-and-go.” With the decline in Jesuit vocations, the school increasingly was being staffed by lay people and lay teachers cost more than did Jesuits! The school created a “Committee on Change” whose mandate was to explore ways of increasing applications, especially among the Catholic community. This committee considered having the school go co-ed and/or having the school add Grades 7 and 8. However, these options were rejected because at their root they were a sort of “beggar-your-neighbour” strategy which could have weakened St. Mary’s Academy and also the parochial schools.
"the Jesuits recognized the importance of collaboration with the lay people in the St. Paul’s mission. the Jesuit approach was to empower others to find solutions and to welcome the expertise"
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THE CRUSADER | SPRING 2020
