By Edward Deignan
Director of Development
Saint Patrick High School is the oldest parish high school in the State of New Jersey having begun its efforts in 1863. The mission of the school has never wavered in its quest to provide a private school education to the underprivileged regardless of their ability to completely afford our tuition. As a consequence, this school has never been able to charge a tuition that would cover our costs for, quite simply, we would have no students.
For 140 years, St. Patrick’s Parish absorbed much of the difference between the tuition charged and what it cost to deliver this education. Demographic changes forced St. Patrick’s Church to merge with another nearby catholic parish in 2005. Anticipating this new configuration, St. Patrick High School incorporated separately as a private school under the auspices of the Archdiocese of Newark. The school subsists on the donations of alumni and friends and a dwindling growth and development fund. St. Patrick High School continues today with the lowest tuition in the Archdiocese of Newark. Our alumni base of over 2,500 graduates has been generous but it is too small to enable us to meet all of our financial obligations forcing us to dip into our savings account annually.
It is now my task to demonstrate the value of a St. Patrick Education. Our most famous graduate was a member of the Class of 1909. His name was Thomas Mitchell and he was an actor in motion pictures, the Broadway stage and on television. He is now best known for his portrayal of the bumbling Uncle Billy in the movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life” shown regularly on TV at Christmastime. But he was much more than that. He acted in over sixty-five movies during the thirties, forties, and fifties of the last century. In 1939, he had prominent roles in five films: “Gone with The Wind”, “Only Angels Have Wings”, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”, “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”, and “Stagecoach”, all of them considered to be movie classics. Over his long career, Mr. Mitchell was the recipient of an Oscar, an Emmy, and a Tony making him the very first entertainer ever to receive the “triple crown” of acting.
In other areas of notoriety, we currently have two of our graduates playing in the National Basketball Association, Al Harrington of the Denver Nuggets, and Sam Dalembert of the Sacramento Kings.
This brings me to the matter of the notoriety of our boys’ basketball program. St. Patrick won its first state championship in this sport in 1936 and we have repeated with victories in sixteen other championship games. Although these wins occurred over many decades, it cannot be denied that the vast preponderance of our success in this sport has happened following the hiring our our current coach, Kevin Boyle, twenty-two years ago. During this period, Mr. Boyle has sent an average of two to three players a year to Division One college basketball programs. This year, Villanova, North Carolina and Duke Universities, three powerhouse collegiate programs, will have former St. Patrick players in their starting lineups. Our dominance in this high school game has not proved to be all good however, for like other persistent winners such as the New York Yankees and the Duke University Basketball Program, there are those who would root against us for no other reason than our regular appearance in the winner’s circle. There are a number of detractors who insist that such prolonged success could not be the result without “the cutting of corners” in the rules and regulations governing the high school game. They employ the ultimate insult by calling us a “basketball factory” which implies that, in consideration of the game, everything else would take precedence over scholastics. These naysayers not only misinform, they have no idea how stringently our current principal adheres to the long-held school dictum, “if you don’t pass your courses, you don’t play!”
Well aware that I am speaking to educators about an after-school activity that may have only tangentially to do with scholastics, I persist, because I hope to show that this program is a microcosm of what this school provides in terms of scholastics and discipline. I have previously told you that our basketball coach has been in his job for twenty-two years. I have said that an average of two to three of our ballplayers receive scholarships to major universities per year. From these two facts, I extrapolate and make an educated guess that we have sent fifty basketball players on scholarships to various colleges throughout the United States. Be advised that all but one of these students qualified for admission by standards set by the school to which they were accepted. Be advised that all but one of these students were scholastically eligible to play in their freshman year in college.
The starting guard on our 2008-09 team was the valedictorian of his class. Majoring in Economics, he completed his freshman year with high honors at Columbia University.
The starting center on our 2005-06 team attended LaSalle University. For the last three years, he has been named to the Al American Scholastic Basketball Team citing ten players throughout the nation who excelled in the classroom.
According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, the average percentage of high school seniors from both public and private schools who continued their education at the next level has averaged about 69% for the past ten years. During the same period, graduates of St. Patrick’s have exceeded that average by more than 20%, with a high of 96% and a low of 89%.
How have our graduates done? I can only speak with authority by using another microcosm, the class of 1954, of which I am a member. We had 52 graduates, which is an average amount for the school, even now. A good number went on to college, which was uncommon at the time. Making extensive use of graduate school at night, my classmates became, in turn, a bank president, a doctor of psychology, a CFO of a multi-million dollar corporation, a municipal court judge, the president and owner of a New York stock brokerage house, two public school principals, and the business manager of the City of Elizabeth.
I would like to conclude by quoting the recent remarks of another educator on the performance of our school. In May 2010, we were visited for the purpose of re-accreditation by the Middle States Association Review Team. As you may know, this is an exhaustive study requiring a number of days on-site. At the conclusion of this evaluation, St. Patrick received reaccreditation and the Middle States team leader, himself the headmaster of a large private school in central Jersey, made the following observation in his report to our administrators:
“Before I came here, like most other people, I knew one thing about you, that you are a basketball powerhouse. You’d be classed with schools nationally like Oak Hill Academy, Mater Dei, and Findlay Prep. That’s true, but your story is so much larger than that. It is a story of visionary leaders, self-sacrificing Charity Sisters, alumni returning home to stay. Yet it is a story of less, of little things: a caring greeting; an encouraging glance to a discouraged child; a fresh start for a troubled youth; an open door long after the school day ends; of successes beginning to happen – however far behind you may have found yourself when grade 9 began…Clearly, in ways you can never measure statistically or make an improvement plan for, but ways only the oblivious would not feel after three days here, is that these students have offered you their hearts. And, you have taken very good care of them.”
