Oral History Program Norm Allred Interviewed by Sharice Stagler 13 July 2010 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Norm Allred Interviewed by Sharice Stagler 13 July 2010 Copyright © 2025 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. 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These oral history assignments were created to help Weber State students learn the value and importance of recording public history and to benefit the expansion of the Weber State oral history collections. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Allred, Norm, an oral history by Sharice Stagler, 13 July 2010, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Norm Allred conducted by Sharice Stagler on July 13, 2010. Norm discusses his experiences as the vice principal and principal of St. Joseph’s Catholic High School in Ogden. He also speaks about different aspects of how the school is run and the ways that has changed over the years. Note: Active listening, transitions in dialogue (such as “um,” “so,” “you know,” etc.), and false starts in conversations are not included in transcription for ease of reading. All additions noted in brackets. SS: This is Sharice Stagler. I’m doing an interview with Norm Allred, the principal of St. Joseph’s High School. It is July 13, 2010, about 4:20 pm. What is your history with the Catholic Church? NA: My personal history with it? SS: Yeah. NA: It’s lifelong. I was baptized at six months of age, and I’ve been Roman Catholic ever since. Lifelong practicing Catholic. My faith is very important to me and very central to my life. I went to public school for kindergarten, and after that I had been in Catholic school up through the 12th grade, and then once again went back to secular institutions, the University of Utah, for my graduate work and my undergraduate degree. So, I’ve been constantly involved in it for the entirety of my life, and educated by it for most of my early education. SS: Did you go to private school here? NA: Yes, I went to Cathedral School, when that was open, through third grade, then my family moved to Sugar House and I went to Kearns-Saint Ann’s School and 1 graduated from there in eighth grade, then went to Judge Memorial and graduated from there in 1976. SS: Okay. What is your history with the school here? NA: I became employed by St. Joseph’s Catholic High School in 1988-89 as a fulltime teacher teaching Spanish and English, and continued in that capacity until 1995, when I became the vice principal and dean of students, and also continued teaching English and sometimes theology. Continued doing a combination of administration as the vice principal and dean of students up through 2002 or 2003, at which point I left here and took a job at St. Francis Xavier, a Roman Catholic K-8 school in Kearns, Utah and taught there for four years, then took the principalship up here in 2007-8. SS: How did you decide to be a principal instead of a teacher? NA: I decided to become a vice principal because I felt there was a good I could do for the school. I felt the school needed somebody who was, well, one thing, stronger and [more] disciplined than the current principal was. He was sweet, he was forgiving, he was counseling, and he, to my mind, did not know how to say “Enough is enough and I’m not putting up with any more of this.” I felt I could help him provide that. What happened was, right about this time of year, I think it was probably August, the current vice principal and dean of students took another position and left, and he had no notice. I said, “Okay, I’ll step up and do it.” We re-negotiated my teaching schedule, cut back a few of my classes, gave them to somebody else, and I took on the job of becoming the academic vice principal at that point. 2 Grabbed on to it with both hands and never let go, and found that yes, indeed, I was good at it. I bring calm to a job, I bring organization, I bring focus, I bring a long-term ability to see how things are going and where things might end up and explore possibilities. Again, emotionally even-keeled, which is very critical, I think, for an academic vice principal and dean of students. I can discipline without getting emotionally involved in it, and that’s kind of a useful thing. Anyway, hung on to it for a long time, then the principal at the time, the same principal I was referring to, said, “You ought to think about being a principal,” so I did. When he left, I applied for the job and they gave it to someone else. Then when that person left, I applied for the job and they gave it to someone else. When his replacement left, I applied for the job and they gave it to someone else. I worked with that principal about three years and decided it was time to change schools and did, then the principalship came open here. I applied, and this time they said, “Okay, we’ll take you.” SS: At this school do you have to have an administration degree? NA: You do. I should have an administration degree and I’m working on that currently. SS: So you didn’t have to have it when you were hired, they just said—? NA: They would’ve preferred it, but they decided to hire me anyway. I immediately signed up for the University of San Francisco where I can get an administrative credential in Catholic school education. I’d begun to pursue an administrative credential through USU several years earlier. For one, it was very difficult to maintain it with my work schedule, ‘cause I was living in Salt Lake, working in Ogden, taking classes in Salt Lake; that only lasted about a quarter. 3 The other thing I figured out, Sharice, was that the classes I took from USU were going to teach me how to administer a public school. There’s a lot of similarity, but at the bottom line this isn’t a public school, and there’s some very fundamental things that are different about a parochial school from a public school. I decided ultimately that if I ever got the administrative credential, I wanted it to be from a place that taught me how to run a Catholic school. So, I went to the University of San Francisco, which is a Jesuit college, and there they teach a program in being a leader of Catholic schools. Took the summer off, but other than that I’m still working on getting a master’s from them in Catholic education. SS: What do you think the differences are between the public school and the private Catholic? NA: On the practical level, funding is one. My understanding of course of all public schools is tax revenue is generated, that money goes to the district, the district portions it out to the schools, and they set your budget and you live within what they proportion to you. It’s much more top-down directed from the central office of the district down to the administration of the school. You’re following chains of command, and you’re following orders, and your money’s given to you by somebody else and your budget’s given to you by somebody else. Here? Completely different. This is a self-funding institution. It is a standalone non-profit. We construct our program and we construct our fees and we bill them out and we have to make our budget work. We’re completely selfdependent on how we both generate and manage our own funding. The diocese 4 has some avenues by which they contribute some things. The diocese serves as a very substantial safety net. When my boiler went out, they were the ones who were able, from their resources, to get me a loan to get my boiler paid for; a loan I had to pay back. They have, in the past, been able to give the schools money to shore them up when there’s been financial shortfall, but then the school has to pay that money back. Again, they don’t direct me from the top and they don’t generate my funds. We’re a self-standing institution, so there’s whole elements that aren’t involved in public schools. I need to be able to approach donors. I need to be able to convince people to sponsor with us on programs. I need to be able to supervise the advancement department while it runs a program where they ask people for money, run a program where they people to include them in their wills, a program for granting grants, programs for running special events that generate funds. So, yeah, it’s very much this whole standalone business now. SS: How much of your funding is through the tuition that the students pay and how much is through private donations and sponsorships? NA: Off the top of my head, tuition money needs to generate about 80% of my operating budget, and the advancement portion generates the other 20%. About a million, two, budget. It’s a pretty substantial chunk of change. SS: And that’s per year? NA: Per year. SS: How many teachers do you guys have? NA: About twenty here in this school. 5 SS: Then what other staff as far as like janitors or yard people? NA: We have one plant manager, janitor, grounds keeper, and he’s currently being assisted by a part-time person, which is very helpful because it’s too much work for one person to do well. We have one administrative assistant school secretary, and a person who comes in as a receptionist for about four hours during the day and does the reception work at the front desk, thus freeing up the secretary to do the behind-the-scenes administrative assistant stuff for the vice-principal and for me. We have a registrar, part time, and then the entire advancement staff, which is the director, the grant writer, the events person, and the student improvement person, who handle that whole area of advancement, fundraising, and student development for both this school and the elementary school. They’re working for both schools. We have a finance officer, either a bookkeeper or an accountant depending on who we’ve hired at this point. This year, that actually happens to be my vice principal, who is a trained accountant before she became a teacher, so she’s enabled to do those two very different functions that are running the books and the finances and running the academic program. SS: She’s going to be the vice-principal and the bookkeeper now? NA: She is. For the coming year, that’s the game plan. We will probably get her a bookkeeper to receipt, make deposits, reconcile things, but she will do the financial oversight, the analysis of where we are from month to month on cash flow and revenue and expenses and how we’re doing on meeting our obligations and straightening our financial ship up. She’ll do the big oversight picture and 6 she’ll have somebody come in probably about four hours a day to take care of the more base-level sorts of things. SS: With the tuition being $8,000, and then you had told me before that it was more for non-Catholic, how do they prove that they’re Catholic or not? Is it by baptism or Church records? NA: That’s actually going through a change right now, because that whole setup is a diocese-in-white policy, which was instituted by the diocese down. The way it’s currently structured is that a family comes in, they tell me they’re Catholic. Sometime early in the first quarter, I will take their name and the parish they tell me they’re connected to, and I will submit that list to the pastor of the parish. It is his job to go through the list and verify that the people who say they are Catholic and practitioners in this parish are in fact that. SS: So, you have to be an active member, not just like, you know, you were once Catholic but have stopped going? NA: Right. You have to in order to get the full Catholic discount. Then the pastor, having checked those people off, then pays me $250 per person he checks off, toward their Catholic education. $250 out of their $8,000 education is the direct Church contribution for their education. SS: Okay, so then they end up paying $7— NA: Theoretically, they end up paying, yes, still most of $7,700 dollars in tuition. SS: You had told me that some students are on financial aid according to their income. What percentage? 7 NA: Probably 30-40% of my students get some level of financial aid based on income. SS: Where does that funding come from? Is it pulled from everyone else’s tuition? NA: Right. That’s how things are currently structured, and Sharice, it’s a model that I personally think the schools are going to have to re-examine and reconsider, because it’s not working the way it’s supposed to. This kind of leads into your question about when the Sisters and priests were here and how finances were structured then, but the way the schools were originally set up is that these orders of dedicated religious men and women would run the school. Because of the kinds of economies that were possible when they were doing that, they were able to fund, within their own resources, the ability to have a Catholic education from the very poorest up. Obviously the wealthiest can always afford to pay for what they’re getting, but under the original structure where the orders were running it, urchin orphans on the street could come to Catholic schools and be taught there, with no parents even, and no financial resources. The model was self-funding, that the orders would be able to handle this with their own economies and the tuition they would charge and some help from outside benefactors. Well, what’s happening now is we have continued to try to self-fund our mission to the poor, and the way it works out, at present, is this: I build into my budget an expected amount of tuition forgiveness, about $250,000 a year. That gets factored into the tuition figure I set. Part of the reason tuition is set at $8,700 is so I can afford to cut off discount, about $250,000 dollars of it for various 8 families along the way, an average of $1,500 per student across my 200-student student body. I’m planning on not collecting average of $1,500 per student. In short, tuition is set $1,500 higher than it really needs to be across the board. The reality is, that does not enable me to fund any number of people who want to come if they don’t bring a certain amount of tuition with them. For every family that isn’t able to bring me $6,500 worth of tuition in payment, I end up having to borrow some of that $1,500 from somebody else, and it limits the amount of really poor I’m able to serve. I couldn’t take 100 families coming in that could only pay me $1,000 a year tuition. I wouldn’t be able to afford it, because of the way our self-funding mechanism no longer stretches far enough to serve anyone who wants to come here. Realistically, I’ve got to balance it out so that you’re able to pay most of 3 or 4 thousand dollars a year, really, to make this work across the board. There can be exceptions to that, but I can’t have too many exceptions that pay too little or I’ll end up not generating enough revenue to pay the bills. SS: Since the beginning of the school in 70s when it was $700, how has tuition changed? Is tuition higher because there’s more people on financial aid, or is tuition higher because education costs are higher and hiring teachers instead of Sisters is higher? NA: I would say, to my mind, it’s the last two you mentioned. Let’s take the second one first. When the priests and nuns were running this, there were several economies that were in place. They lived together in common communities in their convents or their monasteries or their rectories. They all shared one house, 9 which of course drastically cuts down the amount of per-capita housing cost. They shared a common diet and a common pool, so food costs were down. They were all single men or single women; they had no children, they had no husbands, so, you’re only trying to fund one person’s living expenses. By definition, they took vows of poverty, which doesn’t mean that they lived on rags and soup, they lived well, but nobody owned anything personally. Everything was owned by the community. Each of them wore a watch, but the watch belonged to all of them. You just happened to be the one wearing it this week. If the superior were to say, “I want you to give your watch to that person,” that was job. The watch belonged to the community and you just used it and took good care of it. You can see there are a number of economies you can build into that. I don’t think they needed to pay health insurance because, again, at that same time that we had all of these priests and nuns and brothers running the schools, we had also had priests, nuns, and brothers running hospitals. There was a whole internal support network in the Church amongst these orders where there was a lot of mutual backscratching going on and the ability to diffuse the cost of maintaining these individual men and women. Okay, once those individual men and women, once the numbers of vocations declined, and there were fewer of them to teach, and they have to leave, and they were replaced by a lay person who now is not living in community and needs the kind of money necessary to pay for his own house, pay for his own insurance, pay for his own food and then of course the food for 10 his wife and his two or three or four children, all of the expenses necessary to maintain an individual living a normal middle-class lifestyle is much greater for that teacher than it ever was for the brother he replaced. SS: So, part of the salary that the Sisters were getting paid was their housing and food and accommodations. Were they getting salary on top of that? NA: They were. They each got a small amount of direct pay for their teaching, which they immediately gave into the common pot at the convent, and then that was diffused out to pay the things like the groceries and the lights. Again, it was a self-funding organization, but it was based on a large part on the economies possible when you have a community of unmarried people pooling their resources to form a cadre of students. For example, if you’ve seen the Harry Potter films, all of the teachers live at Hogwarts, live at the school on the grounds, and I didn’t see any one of them were parents with children. There’s a whole bunch of economy that goes on with the fact that the school they have to keep open and running and heated and whatever anyway is also serving for their housing. Well, you don’t have to pay them extra so they can each buy their own housing. None of them have children, so they don’t have to be paid money that lets ‘em take care of the kids. There’s all of these economies that used to be possible which are now no longer possible with us laypeople in charge. So, that’s one: the cost of staffing the place has increased dramatically. Probably, by the figure you were suggesting, $700 pays for your $2,000, but it’s 11 costing four to five times that much. Part of that’s because of who’s doing the teaching now. SS: What was the motivation behind not using Sisters and priests and using lay teachers instead? NA: They simply weren’t there. The Catholic Church, if I’m getting my facts right, right around the early 1960s had its highest enrollment in the nation and has declined from there since. Right around the late 60s, early 70s, there was a drop in vocations both in terms of people entering the religious orders or the teaching orders, and people leaving. They gave up their vows, they reentered the secular world, they stopped being nuns or priests. Well, at that point of course they left their teaching jobs behind. So, it was simply that we don’t have the staffing. We just don’t have enough of them to run the schools anymore. What’s happening more and more is the orders that used to run all the schools have retreated back and back and back into administrative positions. If you were to go up to Mount Calvary Cemetery and get in the central circle where there’s the crucifix and the altar, you would find several groves of headstones for the Sisters of the Holy Cross who died and were buried here. Now, there’s a whole other bunch of them who used to live and work in Utah who have died and are buried in other cemeteries across the country to which they were transferred, or in their mother house in South Bend, Indiana. Hundreds of women used to run the hospitals and most of the Catholic schools in Salt Lake. There are, I think, seven or eight Holy Cross Sisters right now. None of them are teaching at the 12 schools, two of them are the superintendents in the central office, one of them is a principal. So, you see the thing? What few that are left aren’t really in the classrooms so much, they’re in administrative positions, and increasingly not school administration but diocese administration or central administration. As they get fewer in number, they’re retreating back to administrative roles rather than out on the common trenches. I’d love to hire priests and nuns; there are almost none to be hired. SS: The reason why people aren’t becoming Sisters, is it just modern times, or is the Church not emphasizing becoming a Sister or priest as much anymore? What’s the cause of that? NA: For me, Sharice, that’s a question I keep pondering, because I tend to figure as a teacher of adolescents, I’m clearly on the front line of convincing young people to consider gifting their life and service to the Church. We’re not quite sure what it is. We all have some theories and ideas, not just us here locally but across the diocese and nationally, as to why we’re having trouble convincing people to consider a religious vocation. Lots of different theories about [how] women in particular have more choices now. In the hay days when there were lots of them in the 1960s, I think your sociology studies will tell you at that point women were looking at a much narrower range of things they could be, of which one of them was a nun. Well, now of course you’ve got all of those choices and all the other choices that are now open to women, so it’s competing against a greater number of possible 13 choices for women. For men, I’m not sure, ‘cause the range for men has not changed greatly since the 1960s. You could be a priest and you could still be all the different things men can be. Secular society? Some theory says that if you’ve got all of these 200 kids that I see in front of me every day, when they look for an example of church service, what they see is a layperson serving his church. Just standing in front of them, I don’t give them any kind of a call to become a brother or a priest, because I’m not one. Not only am I not one, I obviously chose not to be one, because being a nun or a priest is always an option open to any Catholic boy or girl. It’s always a possibility; you have to choose against it and then go on to something else, really. I don’t know, I think that’s one of them, is that we don’t know. This just an isolated anecdote, I don’t know whether it has any statistical validity, but back when I was at St. Francis Xavier, there was an all-school mass. At this point, the priest is standing there, and he’s very personable and he’s very friendly and he’s very engaging, he wasn’t distant or cold or absent. He was very personable, very much with them. He looks out at his entire student body of 200 children from kindergarteners to 8th graders, and he says to them, “When you are married and you have a family, I’m going to expect you to come to the church and do the following things.” Okay. SS: Even he’s not promoting that kind of life. NA: Even he’s not promoting it in an obvious kind of moment. I pulled him aside and said, “Listen, listen to what you just said. You just told your entire student body 14 you do not expect a single one of them will ever take a religious vocation, because you all said ‘When you’re married.’ You just excluded this as a—you don’t even believe it’s gonna happen.” I thought, well, no wonder it doesn’t. If you don’t believe it’s going to happen, it probably won’t. SS: That’s true. What, right now, is your current enrollment? NA: Current enrollment here is… We’re still finishing up for the year. It’s hanging right around 175. I was budgeting for 190, so I need to figure out where that other 10 to 15 kids is. I was just interviewing two of them today, trying to get them to come in. That is statistically where this school has been for its entire history. I think it’s been as high as 213 or 220, it’s been as low as 150. I think, statistically, that’s exactly the same number, right about 200 kids. SS: How many is your building built for capacity now with the expansion? NA: Well, that goes back to your second question as to why this is so expensive, and that’s the nature of education. A high school of the 1960s or early 70s was much more basic than a high school is today. For example, technology didn’t even exist. Technology was business classes with typewriters. This whole field of what it costs to maintain an even vaguely appropriate level of technology, much less cutting edge, is a huge expense to try to keep technology where technology needs to be now. Back in the good old days, you bought mechanical typewriters and they were the same. Didn’t matter if they were 25 years old, they looked exactly—I can’t use a 25-year-old computer. SS: That’s true. 15 NA: Yeah, and they keep coming up with these new gadgets. Trying to keep pace with the technology changes is enormously expensive, and it wasn’t an issue back when we’re doing this comparison to an earlier stage. Science. Science in 1970 was basic scientific subjects. AP classes hadn’t been invented in 1970. How many AP classes exist today? SS: A lot. NA: The International Baccalaureate Program had not been created, concurrent enrollment in classes had not been created. All of this range of educational possibility simply didn’t exist in the same time. It’s not just that they don’t have priests and nuns. I was trying to envision, what would tuition be in a Catholic school if I still had the priests and nuns, but I also still had to fund technology and AP classes, and I had to fund all the stuff that a modern high school has to fund? I bet my tuition would still be [high]. It wouldn’t be just inflation times $700, it would’ve grown, just because it costs more to education now. Put the two of them together, and you’ll understand why the tuition has become what it is. An increased cost of education, with the lay staff, and I don’t have a tax base to pull from. SS: How much of your budget goes to teacher salaries and how much goes to all the other expenses? NA: It’s about the same proportion. Right about 80% of the budget is teacher salaries and benefits, SS: And the rest is utilities and operating costs? NA: [Speaking at same time] And the rest is utilities and operating costs and all that. 16 SS: How do you guys market to get students? When you don’t pull them out of the Catholic community, how are you getting your students here? NA: Well, even within the Catholic community, that’s one of the marketing issues for all of the schools in the diocese and all over the nation. Catholic schools are not used to marketing themselves. They long figured, “Everybody in the Church knows we’re here and they know where to find us and the know how to come get a Catholic education.” They just kind of waited for them to come, and they’re finding that they don’t always come. Especially in places—not so much here in Utah because we don’t have so many, but go somewhere like Massachusetts, there are lots of Catholic schools. They’re all trying to get people to come to them, so there’s a certain amount of competition amongst them just fighting for the same number of people. The other factor is the cost. Again, that issue of not being able to fund all the way to as many of the poor as I would like to be able to serve, it doesn’t take too much to figure. St. Joseph Parish, one of the parishes that are served by our educational mission, has, I believe, 700 children currently enrolled in its religious education program, the Sunday school program as it were. 700 children. Why aren’t those children coming to the Catholic schools? SS: Cost. NA: Must be, but it’s not like I don’t have children to teach. There’s way more than enough children. That’s just one parish. If all of them came to our schools and said, “We want to come here,” we couldn’t accommodate them. It would swamp us. 17 SS: When I was down at the archives reading down there, it seems like in the 50s and even up until the 70s, the Church really emphasized the importance of a Catholic education. They did a lot of fundraising, like when they built the school, they did a lot of fundraising and door-to-door fundraising drives, and they pretty much expected everyone, even people who were not going to attend the school, to give a portion to their salary to the Church to build educational facilities. Do you think that the Church hasn’t emphasized the importance of a Catholic education as much as they used to in the past? NA: No, I don’t think they have, and, for my mind, I don’t think it’s because they don’t think it’s important. They still do. I mean, the Catholic Church started teaching people in the early Middle Ages. They founded the concept of a school. Prior to that, you got an education if you were wealthy enough to pay a tutor to come teach you one. The Catholic Church is the one who said, “No, we’ve got us a cathedral and we need an educated population.” Part of that, Sharice, was simply that in order to be a priest, you had to be able to read, and in the Middle Ages they had a choice. They could get literate men to be priests either from the exclusive world of the wealthy and the rich who have tutors, or they could start educating much more generally so they could have a pool of people to pull from for this literate function. We’ve been in the business of educating people for 1,300 years. We’ve obviously always thought it was terribly important, and we still think it’s terribly important. But, I don’t know the Institutional Church has quite been able to keep up with the way this has changed in, really, a fairly short period of time. The 18 1960s were only 50 years ago, and [as] an institution with a 2,000-year history, that’s not really very much time to have a complete change of how you operate the system from “it’s run by dedicated men and women who have given their lives to the Church” to “it’s run like a business with a bunch of lay people that get to come work for us.” I don’t think they’ve been able to keep up with that change, so they haven’t quite known what to do and how to make sure that it’s a priority and how to make sure they broadcast it as a priority. Some priests don’t think the schools do a good job in religious education. They don’t think we teach the faith like we should teach the faith. Part of that is because lay people are now teaching it. Part of that is because the school is marketing to people on its college preparatory element, on its solid academic background, in part because we’re trying to get people who can pay tuition, because that’s what we need for the funding. This is just me talking, I’m no authority, but my feeling is there are some places that, as schools, we have prostituted our mission to some extent to get the tuition in the door, which has eroded the faith in us as an institution of the Church with the other side of the equation. On my own part, I’ve found that pastors of this area are very cooperative, very supportive, and very interested in maintaining a quality Catholic educational presence in northern Utah. I have also found that they don’t have any very good idea on their own part how they do something to make that happen. “Yes, I want to do something; I support Catholic education.” “Okay Father, so what does that mean?” 19 “I don’t know. I don’t know what I should do.” That’s been one of my goals as an administrator since I’ve been here is recognizing that. I know they want to participate; I need to create a way for them to do that. I need to create an avenue and a spot in this puzzle where they fit. I need to plug them into this and create a way for them to actually be part of it and not just standing back and saying they support it but not having an active role in making it be supported. SS: What do you feel like the role of the Church [is] in the school now? How has it changed since the beginning of the school to what the role is now? NA: Let’s see if I can try to explain this quickly. In terms of the structure of the Church, the governing structure of the Church, the pope is the head of the Church; he is the leader of the bishops. The bishops are in charge of geographic areas called diocese, and then they have a cadre of priests who are diocesan priests. These priests serve in this geographic diocese [under] whoever the current bishop of that area is. To get the sense of [this], the pope runs the world, the bishop runs his section, and the priests minister within the bishop’s section. Pope, bishop, and diocesan priests. The religious orders didn’t function within that system. Religious orders would be a group of men and women, like let’s say the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word. This is a group of women who came together as a group, said, “We all believe the same basic subset of Christian mission vision. We’re going to take these vows and work together to supply education and healthcare to the poor.” They originated in France, they had a significant chunk in Ireland, in the 20 United States they’re centered in Texas. But what I want you to see is they’re not tied to any particular geographic area. They’re tied to the mission they do. Okay, well those Sisters came to the Salt Lake Diocese and said to the bishop, “We will run a school for you.” He said, “Okay.” On that level, the bishop and his diocesan structure didn’t staff Kearns-Saint Ann’s School, they hired the Sisters of the Charity of the Incarnate Word to run the school for them, and they did. So, this order of Sisters who weren’t really part of the diocese ran the school. On some levels, that hasn’t changed. The bishop and the pastor have a school, but instead of being by Sisters, it’s now run by lay people. But it’s not like the diocese has ever run the school, per se. They’ve owned it, it’s been on their property, it’s been part of their parish. but in terms of running it, it’s never been a diocesan function to run it. It’s always been run by the order that did it. So, on some levels, nothing has changed. SS: Does the diocese still own the property and all that? NA: Yes, the diocese still owns the property. The diocese still owns the governing rights, as in the official name of this place is St. Joseph Catholic High School. It can only put “Catholic” in its name if the bishop okays it. The bishop has to permit that to happen if it’s gonna formally title itself “Catholic.” You could—and there is in fact a place in Park City that’s currently starting on this, and there are other places across the nation, where a group of people got together and they run a Catholic school according to Catholic educational principles, Catholic mission, but it’s not an arm of the Church, it’s not necessarily officially sanctioned by the 21 Church. It’s tolerated by the Church, or it’s permitted happily, but they don’t per se take ownership of it. They have the naming rights. It’s almost like a sense of franchise; they can pull your stamp of approval or give it to you. I’m not sure where I’m heading with this, but their sense of responsibility to make things happen directly has never been very strong, not even when the orders were running things, it wasn’t very strong. SS: Off of that, how is religion tied in [to] your curriculum at the school? NA: Religion should be present in all the curriculum. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s explicitly taught. What it mostly means for me is it’s not avoided. SS: So, you don’t not teach Genesis in the Bible because it’s… for science-type stuff? NA: Let me get down more basic and then I can get down to that central question of specific core course content. One of the things that’s most damaging to the Catholic school is having a lay teacher, even a Catholic lay teacher, in a nonreligious subject like English or history, who is afraid and backs away from having any presence of faith in the room. “I’m going to teach my academic subject, and I’m not gonna include religion at all for fear of saying the wrong thing.” They pointedly avoid having any religious content in their class. That’s a problem here. That shouldn’t be that way. SS: How many of your teachers are Catholic? NA: Two thirds to three quarters, and that’s up since I took over. When I took over, I think non-Catholic teachers were probably about 65%. That can become slightly worse with a non-Catholic teacher who’s even more afraid to have any kind of 22 religious witness in the room about their subject area, so they avoid it. They pointedly avoid it. Religion is removed from the content, and suddenly it becomes a secular classroom. I don’t expect the English class to preach doctrine, but I would certainly expect that it is talking about sin, right, wrong, God’s mercy, those basic religious elements as they apply to Romeo and Juliet. I don’t expect it to be a dominant character, but neither do I expect it to never ever show up because it’s being intentionally kept out. Then, of course, in the religion classes, the reverse is true. These are entirely about questions of doctrine and questions of belief and questions of religious laws. SS: Do you guys have specific religious courses? NA: Yes. There’s a four-year study in religious course. Curriculum is set by the National Council of Bishops, what they want taught, and we cover a four-year range of these topics of religious belief. There is a national test given by the National Catholic Education Association. That’s the curriculum and development and instructional pool of all the Catholic schools across the country. It administers what’s called [the] ACRE Test, A-C-R-E. Assessment of Catholic Religious Education is what the acronym stands for. That’s given to seniors to see how well they score on these basic points of belief. Currently, our scores went up a little this year from last year, which were down from the year before, but it’s hovering right around a 70-75% mastery of this material. We think we should be a little better. SS: Now, are all the students required to take that four-year program, even the nonCatholic students? 23 NA: Yes, right. Same is true at the elementary. Religion is taught once a day, and everyone in the class participates in it. Now, the presumption of course is that I would expect a non-Catholic or a marginal Catholic to get something different out of it than I would expect a practiced Catholic to get out of it. A practicing Catholic would get from his religion course or his theology course at the high school guidance and direction and depth and exploration of what he already believes. Those who are not practicing or members of another faith, they’re to learn it and be able to indicate that they’ve learned it. It’s kind of an academic intellectual exercise. SS: Do you get a lot of converts out of the students that come to the Catholic schools because they’re exposed to it so much? NA: We’ve had a few that have made conversions while they are here. By a few I mean I can think of, in 20 years, fewer than 10 out of the hundreds who come through, and then I’ve heard of a few after. SS: How many of your students that you have here have gone through the Catholic private school system their whole lives? Like, went to Catholic elementary and then moved on to this? What percentage come from public schools? NA: You mean come from public school at some point in that 12-year cycle? I would say, over the years, we call them the Lifers, the ones who’ve been together through the St. Joseph system from the time they were kindergarten [and] up, generally is about 40-50% of the class. Then if you add on the ones who’ve transferred in from another Catholic school system, about 55% I’m guessing, with 24 the other 40, 45, 50% coming into the Catholic system somewhere along the way in elementary or high school. SS: This is off topic, but when did the convent officially close to Sisters? NA: Let’s see, the Sisters withdrew from the school, [in] my understanding, in 1978, is when the Holy Cross Sisters, who had five or six Sisters teaching here, said, “Because of reduction of vocation and having to reassign to a different spot, we will no longer be teaching at St. Joseph Catholic High School.” So, I think probably mid, late 70s. SS: When they withdrew, where did they go? NA: The order would have pulled ‘em back from this institution and reassigned them either to other schools in Salt Lake that had Holy Cross Sisters, like Judge Memorial, or to healthcare ministry, or to other Holy Cross schools in other parts of the country, or back to central administration in South Bend. SS: Did Judge keep Sisters in place longer than St. Joseph’s? NA: It did. It kept them a little longer than St. Joseph. SS: I see. When did the convent start being used for other purposes? NA: I’m not sure. Between the time the Sisters left in the late 70s and the time I came about ten years later, somewhere in there the Benedictine Sisters had started using this as their convent. The Benedictine Sisters—that being a different Order—came to Utah primarily to do healthcare at St. Benedict’s Hospital. I think at some point they decided that since there was this empty convent here, they would take over living and using this convent while they did their healthcare ministry down in South Ogden at St. Ben’s. I don’t know, that may have 25 happened when the old St. Ben’s up here on 30th or whatever it is stopped being a hospital and they built a new one. That may have been when they split up with the convent up here. I’m not sure. By the time I was here, the Sisters were serving in St. Benedict’s and they were also using this as a retreat center. There were fewer of them, they had built their own living quarters separate from the old convent, and the convent was being used as a retreat center where they would, in the Benedictine tradition of hospitality, host people coming to this building for one or two or three days and nights worth of religious experience. One of the things, for example, they used to host a lot more engaged encounters and marriage encounters, which was a Catholic retreat program for couples that were getting ready to be married or couples that had been married to deeply explore the sacrament of matrimony for themselves. SS: What is it currently used for? NA: Currently, let’s see. Somewhere about ten years ago the Sisters of St. Benedict built a Benedictine monastery for themselves in South Ogden, and for a period of time right before 2000, most of the Sisters lived there and a couple of ‘em ran the retreat house here. They withdrew from the retreat house business and they all went down to their monastery in South Ogden, and this was suddenly no longer used for anything at all. I think they finally quit running it as any kind of a retreat center in about, I think maybe the first year I came on here, in 2007. At that point, the diocese then had this piece of property, and they’re currently leasing it out to the Women’s Retreat Center of Ogden, which is a 26 women’s 12-step recovery program. The house they live in with the four apartments is currently being used by the school to house teachers from the Pacific Alliance for Catholic Education out of the University of Portland, which is a program where the University of Portland gathers four unmarried young people together who are learning to become Catholic school teachers and sends them as a group of four living in a common housing community to go teach at Catholic schools for a couple years. It’s a very brief joining of an order for a couple of years. SS: So, the diocese generates the income from leasing out the convent, or does the school get some of that? NA: No, that goes to the diocese. The diocese also underwrites the costs and expenses of keeping that place open, so they take in the rent to offset what it costs to keep it up. SS: I see. Let’s talk about the additions to the school that were made around 2000ish? NA: Yeah, there was an addition in 1985, and one in the early 90s, and one in 2000. Which one do you want to start with? SS: I guess from the beginning. NA: Okay. The one in 1985—just before I came here—was a capital campaign run and founded substantially by the Val A. Browning Foundation to put a new library and additional classroom space on the original 1954 building. So, instead of a small one-room library, put in a big library with very, very tall ceilings, two-story ceilings, and two classrooms upstairs, a faculty room downstairs, and eventually 27 we divided the library and created a second classroom on the basement level as well. It increased our teaching space by two to three rooms. It was funny, I got the yearbook for the year that was dedicated, and it said “And now we can enroll the enrollment of the school because we have more space!” It didn’t change. Of course, the expense of running the school changed; we just put a new building on. Now the upkeep and the heating and utilities, and put in two new classrooms, so now we increase the amount of things we teach a little bit. So, it increased expenses but it didn’t increase population. Somewhere in the mid-1990s, they added on to the front of the gymnasium, and they put in a set of public bathrooms, a weight room, and two offices on the front of the gym. One of them is an office for the athletic director, because he had nowhere to do his work. Another was an office for the physical education teacher. The weight room was to put in an official weight room instead of the makeshift weight room we had on the old stage of the old combination gymnasium-auditorium. Put in a set of public bathrooms so that when we had people coming for athletic events like basketball games, they could actually use the bathroom in the gym instead of having to leave the gym, cross the parking lot, enter the main school building, go down the hall, and use the bathrooms here in the main building. So, we added that on. Didn’t increase and all that. Then in about [the] late 1990s there was a big push to recognize the need for a common assembly space, because we used to be able to meet in assembly and do dramatic performances and have our masses and get together for assemblies and all in the gymnasium, in the original 1954 configuration. But in 28 that configuration, the athletic floor of the gymnasium was linoleum, and it was multipurpose. Sometime somewhere in the late 70s or early 80s, they put in a competition-level wood floor for athletic competition, but now of course you can’t have assemblies on that floor, ‘cause you can’t walk on the thing, you’ll scratch it. It lost all of its assembly function, and we were left to trying to pull together assemblies and masses and theatrical productions either outside in the amphitheater or in the basement, and neither was satisfactory. So, a movement began to create assembly space, and pretty soon we started—and we’d begun to have theater productions in the basement, we’d begun to have a music program in the basement, so we began to create a performing arts curriculum to go along with that space. We thought, “Well, while we’re at it we could put in a couple of extra classrooms.” It kind of grew, and then the ALSAM Foundation came in and gave us a substantial chunk of what it was gonna cost to put it together, at which point it shaped up a little bigger in its final shape, and now we have this magnificent performing arts facility and two classrooms and a visual arts studio and a computer science classroom and twice the square footage and air conditioning. We have a soccer field and a parking lot, and not a single more student. We’re still at 200 students. I think we may have discussed this earlier, but we went from seven periods to eight so that we could actually have freshmen and sophomores with an elective so they could actually go to the fine arts building. Prior to that, when we had seven periods, freshmen and sophomores had no elective choices, because all seven of their periods were taken up with core classes. The only 29 people who could use the performing arts building was half the student body, juniors and seniors who have an elective in their schedule. So, we added a period so we could have all the students take electives, which means of course we added a whole bunch of classes and increased the capacity of the building. This is all coming back to your question of how big is the school now? The school could handle 300 kids now. Based on the number of lockers I’ve got and the carrying capacity of the courses in the schedule, we could take 300 students. SS: What extra-curricular activities do you guys offer, and with it being a smaller school, what percentage of the kids actually participate in them? NA: Off the top of my head, I think right around 70% or more of the students participate in at least one extra-curricular activity. Actually, Sharice, it’s kind of critical. In terms of the students who leave the program before it’s finished here at the high school, I find—again, no statistical evidence, just looking—more often than not, they haven’t participated. Participating in one or more activities is a significant and important way to sink your roots into this community. It’s very, very common to participate in at least one extra-curricular activity per year, sometimes one per season, sometimes two or more per season. SS: How has what you guys offer for curricular activities broadened over the years? NA: Well, when Title IX came in and women’s athletics became a requirement course, suddenly there was a whole blossoming of [unintelligible]. I think it’s pretty much stagnated for most of the last 10-15 years. I don’t think we’ve really added any sports to speak of. The change has been in performing arts, where we now have a competition-level drama program. That’s the new addition within the 30 last couple of years. But yeah, it hasn’t changed too much since we started having girl sports as a regular, expected part of the curriculum. SS: When the school opened, it wasn’t just based on the academic and religious classes, they had a lot of extra-curricular? NA: Now, again, back in 1954 and 1970s is kind of like as you were describing the science curriculum has changed, too. In 1954, nobody had girls’ soccer. Nobody had it. Nobody had girls’ anything to speak of in 1954, sports wise. Nobody had boys’ soccer in 1954. For boys, you ran a perfectly acceptable athletic program if you had baseball in the fall, boys’ basketball in the winter, and you had a track program in the spring. That’s not enough anymore. Now you need to have a soccer program for both genders, you need to have a volleyball program, and you ought to have to have a softball program, [because] after all, girls can’t play baseball. Things like cross-country came up. To my mind, Sharice, there are some things that are oddly missing. Wrestling. Why we don’t have wrestling, I don’t understand, because it’s essentially an individual sport, its equipment costs are few, they’re not consumable. Once you get wrestling mats, they are around for a long, long time. You don’t need a lot of equipment or uniform to play it, it doesn’t matter if you’ve only got three or four boys. I can’t play basketball when three or four show up, but I can run a wrestling program if three or four show up. I really don’t quite understand why we don’t have wrestling. Some of our individual sports do best, like we took state in golf. Golf is an individual sport. I mean, I only need a few of 31 them. This isn’t like trying to mount the basketball program, where you have to have a certain critical mass to make it work. One thing we haven’t had is boys’ football. Of course, they’ve always wanted a boys’ football team. Everybody loves football. I think in terms of building community and its potential to be a fundraiser for the athletic program, nothing does it like football does. No other sport can get that many people together in one spot for one reason. Basketball courts just don’t hold that many people. Football stadiums can get thousands of people together for one purpose. Basketball can’t do it; the arena isn’t big enough. But, the problem with football is I understand you need 50 boys to run a basic squad. That’s half my male population. I’d have to have every other boy in the school on the football team in order to make this work. I don’t think that’s gonna happen. SS: That’s true. Are you guys like a 2A school? NA: 1A school. SS: And that’s determined by size, right? NA: Currently it’s determined by size. The High School Activities Association is considering a slightly different way of doing it, but again, my guess is we’ll always be a 1A school. Wouldn’t be any bigger than 2A school, just because we’re just not that big. SS: Then you guys compete against other 1A schools? What other 1A schools are there? NA: There aren’t many close by. SS: That’s what I was thinking. 32 NA: That’s the problem is there are plenty of 1A schools in state; most of them are rural and at distance from there. It has always been a longstanding issue of our school of trying to balance the fact that we need this network of competitors in our region and we have to travel four hours to get to the game which starts at 5, so we have to leave at 1, so we have to miss all the classes in the second half of the day. Travel has a big impact on us. SS: Then you’ve got the added costs. NA: Yes, the added cost of transportation. But this is true, Sharice, for all of the 1A schools, because they’re all rural. It’s not like they’re all close to each other either. They’ve also got long distances to travel. It’s just the issue of being small. They’ve had fairly good luck grouping us with a fairly local group of folk. Some of the other smaller private or religious schools— [Recording stops] [Recording resumes] NA: —Here along the front have been able to get together and form something of a region, so we don’t have to travel quite so far, any of us. SS: Okay, one more. What do you think that private schools offer both teachers and students that public schools don’t? NA: First, I’d want to distinguish I don’t consider this a private school. To my mind, a private school is just exactly that, it’s a standalone institution which is run for the purpose of the educational mission it chooses to define for itself, and it funds itself by charging tuition, versus a charter school, which does all of that, except it works on a charter with the state and funds itself by state contribution. A 33 parochial school is an arm of the Church, and it’s done as a teaching ministry of the Church. So, certainly, that’s the first thing a parochial school can offer that a public school cannot: it’s your church educating your children instead of your state educating your children. Really, I often will tell parents that. That’s the choice you’ve got. You have a little child, don’t you? SS: Two. I have a two-year-old and I just had another one. My baby, she’s a month old now. NA: Okay. In about two to three years in one case and about four years in the other, you’re gonna have a choice. You’re going to put them in a school system. Okay, Sharice, you have a choice. You can have a state, the government—the United States and specifically the state of Utah and specifically the district—but you can have the government teach your children. If you put ‘em in the public system, that’s who’s going to take charge of teaching your kids is the government. Or, you can choose to have a church teach your children. Or, you can choose to have a private company teach your children, like if you put them in Waterford School in Salt Lake, that’s a private enterprise teaching your children. Any one of those things is quite capable of teaching children and has for years. Private enterprise used to teach children for ages in the form of tutors; they did it as a private business. Churches used to teach children as one of their ministries; they’ve done that for a long, long time. The state has taught children off and on for a long time. You’re picking what institution is gonna teach your kids, and I assume you would see that the state will educate to a different purpose than a church will. 34 The state will educate to make you loyal citizens of the country, followers of the country’s laws, and productive members of the country’s society, because that’s what the state is trying to produce is good, productive citizens. I’m going to teach them all of that, because I want productive citizens, but the Church is also going to teach them about a faith component and a higher purpose to life and a belief in God and an understand—it’s gonna teach that whole issue. Private enterprise is going to teach whatever they say they’re going to pay. “We’re going to teach your children to be a great brainiac and get into an ivy league school.” Whatever they’re gonna market, that’s what they’re gonna teach. You decide which institution you want to teach your children. They’re each going to teach a lot of things similar, but some very essential fundamental different reasons for why we do what we do. I think that’s one way to [unintelligible]. Yeah, I teach things as a church school. I teach them about this whole concept of everything you do [is] in connection with a belief and a faith, particularly Roman Catholicism, Christianity in general. One of the other things that I think is different is our mandates. I teach children who want to join our community, the private enterprise places teach the children who want to join their community, but the state has to teach every child state in the state who wants to come to it. Every single one of them, whether they’re bright or dumb, special needs, gifted. Whether they’re there because they believe in the power of education or whether they’re there because the state says I’ve got to be here or I’m truant, which means this is really kind of a form of six hours of jail per day. They’ve got to teach all of that. They have no choice, that’s 35 what they have to do. My option is I can say, “I’m teaching people who want to join our community and follow what our community stands for.” So, what happens is, for me, I’ve got a homogeneity of belief and purpose in this community that I think is its single biggest strength. I’ll just use your children as an example, even if they’re not Catholic. Put your children in our school system as kindergarteners, and I promise you what they’ll turn out like as 12th graders: they’ll be college focused, they will believe there is something bigger and greater in life to do than just make a buck and keep going through the next day, they will have been taught that there’s a higher purpose to their human dignity. My least motivated students are still planning on college. To use a really crude phrase, my bottom sucker students are still pretty good students. Go to a local public high school and that’s not gonna be true. Their bottom sucker students are probably not even on the campus; they’ve snuck off for the day. Well, look at your little girl at two. What kind of a student is she gonna be at 18? You have no idea, do you? You hope she’s this way, but you can’t guarantee it. Even if she’s a great student at seven, you don’t know what’s gonna happen to her when those hormones hit. Hormones hit at 12; she may turn into a lousy student. You don’t know what’s gonna happen when she gets a little further up and she gets boy crazy at about 16. You don’t know what she’s going to do. You put her in this system, a public system, and she’s got all these different options. “I may choose to act like a brainiac, I may choose to act like one of the fashion girls, I may choose to act like one of the sluts, I may choose to 36 skip school.” You’ve got all these choices. She may follow any one of them. Put her in my school, and she may choose to follow the best students or the worst students, but they’re still only about that far apart. Even if she chooses to be a lousy student in my school, she’ll still be a pretty good student in general. SS: Do you guys have behavioral rules, like if they get drug charges they get kicked out? NA: Yup. We have a very solid code of conduct, both the elementary and the high school, it’s very similar. It builds good community. Everybody that’s here buys into it. Now, there’s a difference between breaking the rules and not believing in the rules. Everybody here buys into the importance of this code of conduct; that doesn’t mean they follow it always. They’re not breaking it because they think it’s worthless or pointless, they’re breaking it ‘cause they want to try to get away with something. That’s really a form of acceptance. The code of conduct comes down to is this: say your prayers, wear the uniform, focus on your studies, treat everybody decently, stay away from the alcohol and drugs. All of the rules break down to some variation of those. I discipline about half a fight a year. A couple of guys get out of control, they shove each other around a little, but I grab them by the shorthairs, I bring ‘em into my office, I tell them “You had a fight,” I suspend them for a day, they come back, it doesn’t happen again. Not for them and or anybody else. That’s actually not harsh, is it? They got a suspension for a day, they didn’t fight, nobody else fought, the place goes on peacefully, I don’t have fighting or problems. Cheap price to pay for peace. Works really well. 37 But they all buy into it, so we build this community where the main function of being here is to treat each other decently, say our prayers, and get our homework done. Yes, I have the ability to turn to someone and say, “You are not playing by our rules,” give them an opportunity to make that choice, and eventually, yes, if they don’t make the choice, they go to a different school. Doesn’t happen very often, but it can, and it’s always an option. SS: One more thing that I was curious about: The Browning family, is that the same family that donated the land for the school? NA: Yes. SS: I’ve heard that they are a big LDS family. What is their motivation to donate all the land and funding that they have to a Catholic school? NA: Really, Sharice, I don’t know what motivated them prior to the early 70s. I don’t know why they did that. After the early 70s, part of that was some of their children attended here and found it to be a very valuable experience, so they’ve been supporting it ever since, again, for the quality of educational community it creates. They want that in Ogden, a school where there’s a quality educational community being built. SS: I see. I was just wondering about that. Okay, I think that’s all for today. NA: Well, thank you. SS: I’ll probably think of more stuff, though. NA: I’ll be glad to answer them. As you might notice, I have no trouble running off with my mouth. 38