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-Hello and welcome back to Book Lust.
I am Nancy Pearl, your host.
My guest today is Anthony DePalma, and we'll be talking about his new book
“On this Ground, Hardship and Hope at the Toughest Prep School in America.”
Tony, thank you so much for, for joining me today to talk about your new book.
I have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed it.
And, and I have to say, when I was reading it, I was reading it
almost as though it were a thriller, because I kept turning the pages
because I wanted to find out what happened to those kids
that you talk about in the book.
So I guess my first question is,
what what was the impetus for you writing this book?
I know that, you know, you you're, you worked at The New York Times.
You've written a book about the Cubans and Castro,
and this is a squarely New Jersey
centric book that has implications
of course, for the rest of the country and education in general.
So why did you write this book at this time?
- It's it's one of those books that's both a professional opportunity
and very personal.
I did not go to this school, but I was one of that
huge cohort of baby boomers going through Catholic schools in the 1960s.
So they were about 5 million of us going through the schools.
Today, that number is
down to below 2 million, 70% drop.
Half of the schools have closed, including both my elementary school
and my grammar and my secondary school.
I first was attracted to Saint Benedict's because it was kind of like the school
I went to in that it was all boys and taught by religious.
In my case, Christian brothers, in the case of Saint Benedict's,
Benedictine monks.
The original thing I found out about them
was they did this crazy thing of requiring all their students
to hike 55 miles
for a week on the Appalachian Trail
with everything they needed on their backs.
That was astounding to me that a school would actually require that.
Not as an option, but everyone had to do it.
But the more I found out about the school, the more I was impressed
by the resilience that it has shown.
The resilience of the school,
the resilience of the monks
who went through an awful lot to keep it going, and the resilience,
actually, of the city of Newark, where it is located.
So essentially what what I found was this is a story about a school
that refused to die in a city that nearly did.
And, it I was convinced that it was,
a book, not a magazine article, but a book.
And it has, just for various reason, has taken a long time
to get it into this form that you have in front of you on the desk.
- One of the people,
or maybe the major person who plays the role,
who played a role in in getting Saint Benedict's
to open again,
and you'll tell us that story, I hope, is
Father Ed, who is that was the first head of the school
who was appointed head of the school when he was in his 20s...
I'm remembering
I think. -That's correct. 26,
26 and and continues
as the headmaster today, 54 years later.
He is now 80 years old, and he's there every single day.
You know, one thing I found out about the Benedictines,
that I didn't really have much contact with beforehand,
is that in addition to the vows that many other priests take of poverty,
chastity, and obedience, he, the Benedictines, St.
Father Ed and the others, take a vow of what they call stability.
It's a vow that says to the fellow monks,
I will remain loyal to this community for the rest of my life.
That's very different from, archdiocese and diocesan priests
who get transferred every few years and go from place
to place, and missionaries who move all around.
These Benedictines will stay in the monastery
for the rest of their lives.
Most monasteries are up on top of a hill,
like in Italy or out in the woods.
They're far from people, from cities.
These this monastery,
now called Newark Abbey, was established in the 1850s
on the outskirts of what was then the outskirts of the city of Newark.
As the city grew,
the monastery ended up
now being in the center of the city
with all of the problems and all of the changes that that entailed.
So in 1967, the riots took place essentially across the street from
the abbey and the high school, which is right next to it.
And after that, the city of Newark went into a very sharp decline.
It had been declining, but then it was accelerated,
and the school found it was impossible
for them to continue the way they were.
Was basically a working man's prep school.
It was never the kind of very exclusive prep school you might think the prep
name signifies, but in this case, it was,
a stepping stone for immigrant families.
Originally German Catholic, then Irish Catholic, then Italian Catholic.
And, at the point where we are now in the story
in the early 1970s, the neighborhood is changed, has changed completely.
And even the alumni, the school has been open by then for over 100 years,
are reluctant to send their sons into the city of Newark.
So by 1972, the monks who have stuck it out
until then but are increasingly feeling threatened,
they have break ins to the school;
one of the monks is is attacked, that
it's impossible to stay.
And, they really don't feel that
they are in a position to teach these kids because the culture is too different.
All of the monks are white.
Most of the kids in the neighborhood are Black or Puerto Rican.
And, you know, there Nancy, there's also an undercurrent.
And and Father Ed would be the first one to acknowledge that there was
an undercurrent of the kind of bigotry of lower expectations.
-Right.
-You might consider it racism, and in some cases, it and in some ways,
it was that the Black kids couldn't learn and they wouldn't be able to keep
the monks wouldn't be able to keep the same standards.
So by 1972,
they take a vote.
The majority of the monks, not all of them, but the majority vote
to close the school, which they do at the end of that school year.
And half of the monks immediately take off for a suburban monastery,
that the same monks at the same abbey in Newark had founded
50 years earlier.
The school closed.
The monks have no way that earn any money,
and they're basically supposed to be self-sufficient.
So they look at each other, they take jobs.
It's not really successful.
They look at each other and say, hey,
the neighborhood changed, but the mission didn't.
We're teachers.
These kids need us, so let's figure out a way to do it.
And that's part of the resilience
of what they came up with, which has turned into 50 years later,
a kind of a national model for how to do urban education.
- Yeah, I think that's
what one of the most interesting and an interesting
part of the book is how that, that vote by the monks,
is, is really, a like a metaphor, if you will, for,
for the questions about race and, and,
and the that whole 1960s thinking about
how do we live as a, as a country or a community
of different colors, different ethnicities, all of that.
And, and I thought the fact that there were monks who stayed
and said, “No, this is our mission,” you know, “this is our community.”
And part of that is building that community, built this, this school.
And then the, you know, following on that, it wasn't originally called
a prep school, which is another thing I think Father Ed would would,
you know, come well, had a big hand in, in that.
So tell us that tell us that story.
- He did.
And I think it goes back to that same idea
of a lower lowered expectations.
So the school, they decided to reopen the school.
It's going to be on a much smaller scale.
They go from 600 boys to 89
in the first class.
Of the 89, 85 are Black and Puerto Rican,
four are white kids, including Father Ed's younger brother.
So they make a deliberate decision that they don't want it to be all Black.
They want it to be mixed.
They want income levels to be mixed as well.
Father Ed does an interview with The New York Times
and says, “We're not going to shovel everybody into college.
We're going to do what the kids need, and we're going to call it....
We're going to call it Saint Benedict's.”
They leave off the word prep.
At some point after that first class is in,
the school and the parents
who are making big sacrifices to have their sons there are involved;
there's a meeting with the monks and one of the parents, a Black parent,
stands up and basically challenges Father Ed and the other monks.
And he wants to know why, when all of the kids were white,
the school was called Saint Benedict's Preparatory School.
But now that most of the kids
are not white, but are Black or Puerto Rican,
the name prep has been dropped.
Well, it is a real reawakening for Father Ed,
who realized that maybe he was guilty
of some of the same kind of bigotry and racism of the monks
who decided to leave, and immediately they make the decision to change it
to Saint Benedict Preparatory School, which is what it was and what it is today.
- Right.
And and the curriculum
at that time, the school did not include girls.
It was an all boys school, which so many of the Catholic schools
at that time were, were same sex
schools.
But Father Ed and the other monks make a decision
to include girls at Saint Benedict's.
So tell us that story.
- They, that only took place at a in 2020 during Covid.
So a nearby Benedictine academy in the city of Elizabeth,
which had been around for 100 years, taught by Benedictine nuns.
But there's really no connection between the abbey and, the,
the nuns, monastery that's also a monastery.
They're victim of the same process of declining enrollment, rising costs.
Kids are not willing to come in. So after,
Covid comes along, and it really is the nail in the coffin.
So the nuns decide to close the school.
The girls in the school.
This is the girls themselves, the student leaders
who have been taking
courses with
leadership courses with the counselors from Saint Benedict’s.
So in the last few years, there has been a connection.
So they know what the rule of Saint Benedict is.
1500 year old rules, 73 different chapters that basically says
you need to be aware of the needs of the community, right?
The people around you.
So the girls themselves, the senior leaders in the girls school
who are about to graduate,
so they're taken care of, but they're worried about their sisters,
and they've already learned the lesson from Saint Benedict's, which is emblazoned
over the front entrance and says, “Whatever hurts my brother hurts me.”
So they go to the leadership in the boys school.
They hatch a plan, they drag
Father Ed in, and they say, you've got to do something.
You've got to get us in here.
Now, by that point, the school had gone through
almost 150 years of history as an all boys school.
Nobody had ever considered the possibility of the girls being there.
Father Ed says there's no money,
there's no space, there's there's no way we can do this.
And the girls insist that you have to.
So he now refers to it as the girls breaking in to the school.
He figures out a way to do it,
that the the rule of Saint Benedict's requires it.
And, they bring in a very small cohort.
Luckily for them, it was Covid,
so they didn't need this space right at the beginning.
But now they're up to an enrollment of 200 girls physically on the property.
It's co institutional, not co-educational.
So the classes don't mix.
But they are involved in this very important thing
that they do every morning, which is called convocation.
All 600 of the the prep school students,
including the girls and the middle division, the little ones come in
and they spend not 5 minutes or 10 minutes, but 45 minutes,
sometimes up to an hour, just developing
and maintaining this sense of community.
So when they take when they take attendance, just a very small example,
it's not just who's present,
They have to report in the leadership structure,
so the students are doing it themselves.
They have to report that of this group
say it, this group of twenty, fifteen are here,
but the five by name are John
who's at the dentist, and so on, all the way down the line.
And whoever is not there, someone has to call home
and find out where they are, when they'll be back,
and make sure that it happens.
So that is a sense that they, they reinforce every day
that this is a community
that once you earn the right to join it...
And that's where the the hiking the trail and doing some of the other
physical things that they do,
I mean, get involved.
You have to meet those requirements in order to become part of the community.
And once you're in, you are in.
So it's in a way, it's their version of that vow of stability.
And, they follow that through all the way.
That aspect of community is one of the things I think
is the most important thing that they do that other schools can also learn from.
Can't do it the way they do it necessarily,
but they can do things like that to make the kids understand that
they are part of the community and that what affects my brother affects me.
- Yeah, that was a very moving part.
I think, a very meaningful part of the school's mission,
to, to instill that in the kids. One of the one of the, young men
that you talk about in the book is Ray,
and he's a leader at the school, and,
is found cheating on an exam.
And the school, Father Ed and the school has to decide
what what the punishment should be,
which could be as bad as expulsion.
And and I don't think I'm exaggerating that, Ray
really he leads the convocation.
He's the, you know, the top senior, I think, at that time. And,
has enormous power
among the students and and Saint Benedict's,
you explain so you know so well is a school where deliberately
the students are making many of the decisions that form
at other schools, and formerly the administration might have made,
and they're trusted to do that, which is like, amazing.
So what happened to Ray?
- It reads something like a mystery.
And in fact, from the writing point of view, I was determined
that this was going to take place during this, this one year, the 50th year.
So the deal that I made with the monks was that they would give me access
and I would write whatever happened.
So I was trying to pick my subjects.
I didn't start with any.
Ray, and that's not his real name,
we had this go back and forth about it, but,
I decide he wants his real name in there,
but I decided it probably is not a good thing for him.
He'll.
He'll recognize that in ten years.
But he stands out.
He's a natural leader, and he comes from a disadvantaged,
kind of dysfunctional family that was involved in drugs
and had spent some time in jail and he wakes up one morning,
Ray wakes up one morning with a Swat team in his bedroom coming to arrest his dad.
And early on, he starts to show how,
what kind of a leader he's going to be, and he's going to be a very strong leader.
So they get the students, get involved in another episode early on in the book
when they're soccer team, which is
it hadn't lost a single match in 106 games.
Right.
They are the national prep school champions.
Their number one player is the high school
soccer player of the year two years in a row.
They haven't lost any game until I happened to show up
to report on this championship game.
And they lose.
And of course, these are high school kids,
tough kids from tough streets, who've had tough lives.
And they sort of react in the way you would expect them to react,
which is not great when the team loses.
So they start exchanging emails.
Ray is monitoring them.
It's a little bit of trash talk, but then it it escalates into some pretty
serious stuff, kind of reflective of where we are in the country today.
And so, a couple of the kids on the rowing team
who aren't getting much attention start to say, well, why did the school
bring in this key soccer player from Africa and give him a scholarship?
And his buddy on the team also got a scholarship?
Rowing team doesn't get that kind of money.
So they are back and forth and they eventually say
send them back to Africa.
But like a 14 or 15 year old kid doesn't
really understand maybe, how serious that is.
But Ray did and Father Ed did.
Father Ed gave him one punishment, but it was just a day.
But Ray stood up and said, look, that's not enough.
Just to expel, just to suspend them for a day.
So he takes away their uniform
so they're no longer a
part of the community, and they have to appear
at morning convocation and apologize to the whole school.
That's pretty tough stuff.
But he's the one who's insisting on it. Go a few months
later, and ironically, and I had no idea this was going to happen.
He was the hero of the book,
the natural leader.
He ends up trying to fudge on a test
to increase his score so he could get into the college that he wants.
So he cheats.
And ironically, he cheats using his phone.
One of the hard line decisions he made early on was to,
ban all phones from the school.
But except for the leaders who needed in order to coordinate leadership.
So he does that.
But what what I think what it says that so important is the Benedictines
going back 1500 years, always leave open a path to redemption.
And so, the kids who
who texted had their, their membership taken away,
but they're given the opportunity to regain it, which they did.
Ray loses his leadership position.
They don't expel him, but they he cannot be the leader any longer.
He keeps his uniform, but each uniform has a crest, the same Benedict's crest.
His is taken off.
So everybody knows that he's the one who did this.
But he doesn't shrink
away.
He doesn't hide in the corner.
He doesn't get angry and say, I've only got five months left in school...
I'm not even going to show up because of the way they treated me.
He stays there.
He continues to lead wherever he can.
In the end, when they have senior night,
he has to sit there and watch his replacement,
somebody they grab from a a lower level of leadership
when the, the presidential medal,
that by rights, ought to have been his had he not made this mistake.
And, he sits there with his head up and congratulates his friend
and remains there.
And I think, I think that's that is the message.
Not that he cheated.
Unfortunate that he did.
I think he learned the lesson, but that having made a mistake,
he came back and insisted that that mistake is not me.
And that's part of what what Father Ed
has been teaching these kids for the last 54 years.
Yes. It's important that you learn the calculus
and the algebra and the history, of course, but,
father, his point of view is that you really evaluate
the success of an education, not by necessarily
what they learn in the classroom, but by the people they become.
And so it was important for me having spent two years
with these young kids, to also spend time with
some of the alumni who may have gone through the school
50 years ago and what they have turned out to be.
And, time after time after time, I found that
some of those lessons have stuck with them forever.
Maybe the calculus didn't, but the idea of protecting my brother
and being part of the community, that lesson did stay with them.
- Yeah, well, thank you.
Thank you again for being on the show.
And thank you for writing this book.
I think it's filled with lessons that,
the larger community can take.
Thank you.
- Especially at this time, learning about and being around selfless people makes it
easier to sort of deal with the chaos and some of the darkness that we have.
So thank you for giving me the opportunity.
And, and, I hope everybody has a good read.
- Thank you.
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