With school about to start, the St. Aug controversy through the eyes of one reporter

St. Aug's paddle proponents hit back: James Gill
Published: Sunday, August 07, 2011, 8:00 AM
By James Gill The Times-Picayune

 The paddle is never going to be reintroduced at St. Augustine High School; it is inconceivable that either its owner, the Josephite Order, or Archbishop Gregory Aymond, would capitulate that far.

But something's got to give, because St. Aug is fed up with being told what to do by distant outsiders. Hordes of solid and prosperous alumni figure they are proof enough that St. Aug knows a thing or two about the moral and intellectual development of black adolescents.

Maybe resistance will win more local autonomy and concessions short of the renewed beatings that have been stridently demanded at St. Aug.

When the Josephites called a halt at the school last year, its president, the Rev. John Raphael, members of its lay board and a slew of alumni suggested corporal punishment was integral to its success. That is a somewhat old-fashioned notion, and St. Aug was the last Catholic school in the country to employ the paddle.

Aymond endorsed the Josephites' position, while a study he commissioned suggested that corporal punishment at St. Aug was not always the benign educational tool its supporters claimed.

Raphael and St. Aug alumni filed lawsuits challenging the accuracy of that study, which reported that at least three paddled students had been taken to the hospital. Aymond responded that he had also received complaints of injury, whereupon some of the hotter heads more or less called him a liar.

Regardless, St. Aug's disciplinary techniques would have qualified in a different context as criminal assault, and further debate was pointless. Paddling fans nevertheless continued their campaign with rare zeal. Their devotion to thrashing minors seemed to border on the weird.

Except that their devotion appeared to become intense only after the paddle was banned. Feelings ran high because Aymond and the Josephites, in issuing instructions about how the school should be run, were taken to imply a want of faith in local competence. Parents figured they didn't need a bunch of priests in Maryland telling them how to raise kids in New Orleans.

The rebellious spirit grew apace, with Raphael leading the pro-paddling protests until the Josephites ordered him off the campus and transferred to Baltimore. The school's lay board of directors, by a vote of six to one with five abstentions, promptly countermanded that order and amended the bylaws to wrest control away from the Josephites.

That would appear to exceed the board's authority by many miles. The Josephites own the school, which they established in 1951 and have, according to incorporation documents, sole authority to run it and to amend the by-laws. Raphael was not entitled to file a lawsuit without their permission, the Josephites say.

The local board, once purely advisory, was granted limited powers of governance in 2005, but the seven Josephite priests who make up St. Aug's board of trustees remain boss.

Troy Henry, chairman of the local board, pushed through motions to reinstate Raphael and to sideline the Josephites by adding 14 lay members to the board of trustees.

Declaring those motions invalid, the Josephites fired Henry and the five other recalcitrant board members, but they refused to budge. Now, however, federal judge Jay Zainey has ordered them to quit "asserting or holding themselves out to be directors of St. Augustine" in a temporary restraining ordered he granted the Josephites when they filed a lawsuit to undo what they termed, with some justification, an "attempted coup."

Maybe the Josephites have the law on their side, but St. Aug has the passion. The school has long been a feather in the Josephites' cap and neither side has much to gain from prolonging hostilities that have inevitably aroused racial resentments. In the middle of the brouhaha, the Josephites did appoint, in Rev. William Norvel, their first black Superior General, but he promptly disabused any St. Aug directors or alumni who thought he might share their views on paddling.

It is somewhat laughable when Henry deplores the "undue influence" the Josephites wield at their own school, and, if they and the archbishop regard corporal punishment as incompatible with Catholic principles, their views have to prevail. But the Josephites will have to tread carefully from now on, because, if the paddle is outmoded, so is tame submission.