EVERETT – School hasn’t begun, but Deacon Patrick Moynihan, the new president at Archbishop Thomas J. Murphy High School, doesn’t like to waste time.
“I want you to read the dress code and think of me as a person who says, ‘You’re beautiful the way God made you,’” he told a group of freshmen who gathered in the school’s gym for orientation on Friday. “Look at that dress code and think about the dignity of human life.”
The students stared solemnly at Moynihan. After all, his talk about the dress code came on the heels of references to children dying in Haiti. Moynihan’s crowd, teens at a notoriously tough age, appeared a little shell-shocked.
Moynihan, 42, wasn’t just throwing out harrowing world statistics to startle. He was sharing the story of the place he’s come from.
Since 1996, Moynihan, along with his wife, Christina, and their four children have lived and worked in Haiti, at a Catholic boarding school for poor children.
There, Moynihan said, students were focused and earnest.
“It was literally do or die,” he said. “You dropped out, and there was no safety net.”
“Do or die” was a mantra for Moynihan more than once in Haiti.
During part of that time, Moynihan kept close tabs on the political riots that filled city streets. He needed to determine whether it was safe to bring college students to work at the school.
His efforts were remembered when it really counted.
When Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide fled the country and Haiti collapsed into anarchy in 2004, Moynihan’s young staff escorted Moynihan away from danger.
Moynihan’s experiences in Haiti have indelibly affected the way he runs schools.
“The problem isn’t the kid I educate,” he said. “The problem is the kid I don’t educate.”
Moynihan was the youngest of eight children, raised in Marietta, Ohio. He attended Catholic elementary schools and public high school, then earned an education degree at Brown University, an Ivy League school in Providence, R.I. Disillusioned after a few short years teaching, Moynihan became a stock trader. But it wasn’t long before he was lured back to his first love.
“I had a conversion,” he said. “I realized that God would always take care of me and my family, so we could afford to take more risks.”
The family moved to Haiti. After a decade there, Moynihan said he could do no more for the school.
“You’ve got to know when it’s time to go, and you’ve got to trust that God needs you in another place,” he said.
For Moynihan, that place is Everett’s Catholic high school, where he hopes to dramatically expand the number of students who use financial aid.
With annual cost per student hovering just below $10,000, Moynihan believes the school should veer away from being dependent on tuition.
He also hopes to overhaul the school’s disciplinary system.
“The students here used to pick up trash as punishment, but work should not be a punishment,” Moynihan said. “I can’t make students pick up trash then tell our maintenance workers they’re not being punished.”
Moynihan hopes his students will learn that what they receive for free, they must be willing to give to others. That includes education.
“My students in Haiti weren’t poor, their parents were,” he said. “My students here aren’t wealthy, their parents are. But they’re all just students.”
Reporter Krista J. Kapralos: 425-339-3422 or kkapalos@heraldnet.com.
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