For Red Lake priest who helped turn around school, parish is 'a family'

The priest who runs the smallest and poorest Catholic parish and school in Minnesota got his wallet and Sunday collection swiped from his office last week.

Less than an hour later, a woman knocked on Father Jerry Rogers' door at the St. Mary's Mission Church and School complex, located inside the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indian Reservation. She had read or been told about a Facebook post about the incident.

"I heard your wallet was stolen," she said. She reached out and handed Rogers a fist full of change.

"This is all I got."

A few more people would show up the next day, contributing more loose change or a buck or two.

"These people, I love them," Rogers told me moments before the start of a fund-raising event last Thursday at St. Pascal Baylon Church on St. Paul's East Side. "The kids, they are precious to me. It's great to see them smile, laugh, be kids. The mission is the safest spot on the reservation."

He didn't feel that way seven years ago. After 15 years at a large and well-stocked church in Detroit Lakes, Rogers was sent to replace Benedictine Monastery nuns whose order had pretty much run the mission and school on the reservation since 1888. He thought he was being sentenced to purgatory, if not hell.

"As a young priest, Red Lake was a place that you prayed and hoped you would never see or be assigned to," he said. He had heard the story that a priest had been run off the road years ago and his car torched.

He found a pre-K-sixth grade school with about 47 students. No more than 25 percent were reading at grade level. Some classrooms did not even have textbooks. He learned kids were passed along to the next grade regardless.

He shed tears after arriving, "accusing God of screwing me and the bishop of punishing me," Rogers would tell the crowd at the fund-raiser gala last week.

Seven years later, there is no other place where he feels he is needed more. Enrollment has more than doubled. Most students read at grade level and some above it. Math scores are also on target. Some might consider the turnaround a minor miracle, considering the sobering list of hardships Rogers rattled off during our chat:

100 percent of the students are considered at risk.

Roughly 80 percent are born with fetal alcohol syndrome or addicted to meth or heroin.

More than 30 children and youths, including a 6-year-old, though none from the school, took their lives in the past two years.

The unemployment rate is well above 50 percent, with an average lifespan of 45 years.

"These are not just statistics; when you live up there, they are people," Rogers reminded me.

Yet, no more than 32 percent of fifth-graders from the same background and challenges at a public elementary school on the reservation were reading at grade level during the 2012-2013 academic year.

How did you do it? I asked the good priest, the same question a public school superintendent posed to him after a recent tour of his school.

Here's a rundown:

"We are a family," he told me. "The greatest thing that those people have taught me is the importance of relationships. When you work with generational poverty and historical trauma, what counts is the relationship they have with you. And they need to know that you are there for them and that you care."

He hired a new principal and seven new teachers - all lay, mostly young, with the expectation they will rotate out in a few years.

Each student has an individual education plan. Rogers gently coaxed a reading specialist with a doctoral degree to accept a salary less than half or more of what she would make elsewhere.

"She told me that what she really wanted was to make a difference in the lives of these students," he said. "I found her the first day, wearing a princess outfit while reading a story to the children about a princess."

The student-to-teacher ratio is roughly 12-to-1 or lower. There's a phone in each classroom. Teachers are required to call each student's family or caregiver weekly to inform them of the child's progress or accomplishments or areas for improvement.

"Teachers don't need to be native Americans to teach our kids," he informed the attendees. Empathy, not pity, is a requirement, because pity "leads to lower expectations."

"When teachers feel empathy rather than pity, they establish a culture of caring, not giving up," he said.

There is "one-hundred percent" parental involvement, Rogers added.

Summer school is called "summer adventures." About half of the student body takes part in summer courses and activities. A different group of high school students from across the state and other parts of the country come weekly during the summer to help improve reading and math proficiency.

Learning about Native American culture is part of the curriculum. Although a nun teaches religion, there is no proselytizing. Roughly 30 percent of the students have been baptized.

"The way we teach religion is in how you treat these kids: you treat them with profound respect," he told me. "It is easier to build strong kids than to repair broken adults. We have to stop using poverty as an excuse into giving up on kids. We firmly believe that it is good teaching that changes kids."

The mission and school face monumental financial challenges. The annual budget is $700,000.

Few families can pay the $425 tuition. Some pay some; many don't pay at all. Collections at Mass are a pittance. But Rogers has vowed not to turn any child away because of lack of money.

"We raise every penny of it," said Rogers, which is why he was at the St. Paul fund-raiser and spends a good part of the school year on the road, "shaking the tree."

Things could get worse. The Diocese of Crookston, which oversees the mission and school, could face the possibility of filing for bankruptcy as a result of child-sex-abuse scandal settlements and pending lawsuits, Rogers said.

There was talk of closing the school two years ago and also shortly after he arrived and saw the light of calling in Red Lake. He argued both times that if there is one school in the state that should not close, this is it.

He is much appreciative that the tribe stepped forward last year with a $125,000 contribution to help keep the school doors open.

After learning that many Red Lake children who enter kindergarten are already two years behind in cognitive brain development, Rogers said, there's a push to also raise funds to create a "baby space" for infants and toddlers. The plan calls for the Science Museum to design the new classrooms.

"It's always a struggle," acknowledged Patti Spry, who serves as the school's part-time development and outreach director and also writes grants. "But just when it seems we will not make payroll, something seems to come up, and somehow we make it."

Rogers can attest to that. He went to the DMV office in Bemidji to replace the stolen license before making the trip to the Saintly City. He realized he did not have his checkbook to pay the $16.75 fee. All he had in his pockets were the loose change and few dollars the Red Lake folks who rapped on his door had given him.

It came out to exactly $16.75.

"The lady waiting on me started to cry," he recalled. "I said, 'Don't cry. There's just good people up there.' "

Rubén Rosario

From smoking crack in a Harlem drug den for a front-page exposé to covering the deaths of 86 people in a Bronx social club fire, Rubén Rosario spent 11 years as a writer for the New York Daily News before joining the Pioneer Press in 1991 as special correspondent and city editor. He launched his award-winning column in 1997. He is by far the loudest writer in the newsroom over the phone.

http://www.twincities.com/2016/05/01/red-lake-parish-priest-learns-its-all-about-relationships/