Articulating "IT": The Special Olympics Track Meet '14

I'll ALWAYS remember the day.  It was January 18, 2011.  I was sitting in my office in Springfield, MO preparing to make the most exciting phone call of my professional career and also agonizing over what I would need to do once the call had concluded.

With confidence and enthusiasm, I placed the call and officially accepted the position of Principal at St. John Vianney High School in St. Louis! It was a pinnacle of  my career.  After an extensive six month nationwide search, Vianney selected me and I could not have been more elated to join the faculty/staff of the Golden Griffins.

The agonizing and excruciating part was to follow.  Having spent nearly a decade coaching and teaching at Springfield Catholic High School. After so many wonderful educators there helped me grow and progress and become the person and leader I was, I had to find the words to express my gratitude, my appreciation, and love for them. Saying "Yes" to Vianney was easy, but saying "Good-bye" to a community that had meant so much to me and my family would prove much more difficult.

Immediately upon my announcement the questions came rapidly, and were organized under the same theme, "Why?"

One would assume that having earned my doctoral degree from St. Louis University and having spent my classroom years teaching English that it would be easy for me to articulate this momentous career change. And yet I struggled to find the words.  They would not bounce off my tongue, my brain seemed scrambled and disconnected.  The best I could come up with was, "They have this thing," "It is a special place." "I felt welcome, like I was family."

I was so frustrated with myself.  This Springfield community deserved so much more!  A deeper explanation of why I was leaving. Certainly my heart felt much more for the place I was headed to and all I could say was "IT."
Wow! How articulate!  They must have thought I was a moron.  Many of them  looked at me with frustration. I know I saw disappointment in some of their eyes, confusion in others.

He said, "It" they whispered.

Three years later the feeling of "IT" still permeates my body!  Each day my love and affection for Vianney's "IT" grows stronger and stronger.  Even if my mouth and vocabulary still struggles to articulate exactly what "It" is.

Today was another (in a long list) of living moments where 'IT" was present at Vianney.  We hosted our 12th Annual Special Olympics Track Meet.  Our school went out of it's way to put on one of the most remarkable acts of selfless charity that I've ever witnessed.  More than 150 special-athletes stormed our campus and partnered with more than 150 of our Golden Griffin students and from the second they arrived, the magic happened.

As an outsider who came to Vianey three years ago I saw in the eyes of the Special Olympic athletes exactly what I had felt three years earlier.  They saw "IT."  For some, "IT" was in the form of a smile on the face of one of our Vianney students.  Others saw "IT" in the energy and enthusiasm of teachers, Charlie Walsh, Paul, Rhame, and Bob Trowbridge who have been running this track meet for years!  During some moments you actually had to wonder who were the students and who were the teachers as Charlie, Paul, and Bob beamed with pride, let out full-laughs, and shook hands and greeted every student that crossed their path.

Watching our students interact with the special-athletes was a priceless memory that would make any school administrator boast with pride and secretly shed a tear of joy.  Our students were AMAZING!  They were placed in difficult situations that would make most teenagers uncomfortable, frightened, and resistant.  If they were any of those things they never showed a crack in their armor.  For one day they welcomed the special-athletes to our campus and treated them like they were life-long classmates, like they were family.  In their words and their actions they expressed that today, EVERYBODY was a Golden Griffin!

And that's when it struck me. If you were an outsider and wanted to visit Vianney for one day to witness what "It" is, what makes our school so special and unlike any other, all you would have to do is arrive for our Special Olympic Track meet.  Here you would learn everything about our miraculous students, faculty, and staff.  Foolishly I used to think this event was about our visitors with special needs and the learning experience they would get while visiting. Little did I realize, this day was about so much more.  The real winners on this day were our students.  Their opportunity to witness and serve others.  Their opportunity to demonstrate to the community everything they have learned at Vianney.  They are practically unsupervised as they lead these special athletes through event after event, and each one of them terrifically displayed exactly what it means to be a Griffin.  Their attitudes of servant leadership, their displays of character, their friendliness, patience, charm, and respect for others proves they not only are learning here, but LIVING our mission.

In one day, a few hours, I was able to see , AGAIN, what my words still struggle to articulate. So since my words still escape me, here's a quote from author, Jon Gordon that articulates more about Vianney's faculty, staff, students and community far better than I ever could: "When YOUR work is about OTHERS and NOT about YOU it becomes a Movement."

We have a special "IT" in our Catholic, Marianist school.  An "IT" that has survived 54 years of tradition.  I'm fortunate to be part of "IT" and look forward to developing men of character and accomplishment for many more years to come.

^{MPE—the roadmap for life}

 ^“Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.” 

B. F. Skinner

Before there was GPS, there was MPE.
MPE was similar to GPS in that it provided instruction, guidance, and helped me make sure I got where I was going in life. It was different in that it is required no technology.  It did not come out with a new operating system every six months, and an operation manual was not required.

No, MPE—”My Parents’ Expectations”—focuses entirely on providing a foundation that will guarantee achievement in every area of a child’s life; these expectations include, but are not limited to, education.

Often, MPE statements are clichés that, once recycled into the lives of the young, become the tenets, along with those of their Catholic faith, that undergird their lives. Such was the case with me.

For example, ^“Can’t never could do anything,^” was my father’s MPE response every time my siblings or I whined—usually any time something was, or even gave the appearance that it might be, a little difficult.

^“Now, get busy” always concluded his Can’t declaration. Long before I understood the logic of the first part, the ^“get busy” directive was ingrained in me as habit.

 In this way, my father’s use of MPE developed independence ­and the ability to self-start in me. My father’s MPE was so powerful that Nike and Phil Knight recycled the cliché years later—with­out even bothering to gain his  permission—and adopted it as their “Just Do It” slogan.

Then, there was the “Do your best, work hard, and you can achieve anything you want” MPE mantra in our home. No one was excused from working hard or giving less than his or her very best effort at all times. From experience, my parents knew that adolescence was the training ground for life, so we had chores at home, part-time and summer jobs at an early age, and hordes of extracurricular activities in which to participate. My parents understood how easily society allows individuals to settle for the least that life has to offer; they had shunned the perfect opportunity to do so, and they pushed us to do the same.

My parents didn’t just teach this MPE; they lived it. My father has worked hard his entire life to provide for our family.  He is the definition of a “self-made” man.  Likewise my mother has followed her own MPE, sought her own development, and without ever attending college became the vice-president of a mortgage company.

They both are shining examples of hard work and model parents. At any point during their nearly 40 year marriage they could have easily justified providing the minimum for their children. Instead, my father spent many years working 50 or more hours each week, combining full and part-time jobs to make ends meet to provide for us. While doing so, he never missed a ballgame or other important event in any of our lives. He found the time, somehow, not only to carry us on amusement park trips and tell us stories about his youth, but also to share his dreams, which inspired us to dream, too. At home, my parents constantly read and played games with us, helped us with our homework, and made sure, though money was sometimes scarce, that we got those ^“little ex­tras^” we craved at least once in a while. Their MPE modeling taught us that no adversity in life had to define us if we didn't allow it to do so. We could choose our perspective and our reaction to other people^’s perspectives—we alone were responsible for the outcomes of our own lives, not anyone else.

Lastly, the MPE ^“Get an education^” refrain was so often repeated that I was well into school (1/2 way through my doctoral program) before I realized that the three words could be used separately in a sentence. Ahead of their time in their advocacy for higher edu­cation, my parents promoted college not as an option for me, but as the only op­tion. My parents stressed education as the road to all the opportunities that they wanted for us and that we would eventually want for ourselves. While my siblings and I all attained dif­ferent levels of formal education, each of us continues to grow and use education to achieve what we desire in life.

Only with age and the passing years have I truly realized the gift that my parents were to their children or the gifts that they gave to me in the form of MPE statements. Only in retrospect have I understood that MPE wasn't just about values, discipline, succeeding in life, and expectations; MPE was a gift of love—a love that cared enough to hold itself responsible for not only teaching life lessons, but holding me accountable when I gave excuses instead of my best. So as the school year quickly ends and you begin to think about next year’s classes and students, maybe you’ll also roll out some of your own MPE’s in your classroom next year too. For those students who haven’t been exposed to the MPE, it might make all the difference in the GPA’s.