There is always news in the world about heroes. We’ve even talked about unsung heroes in this newspaper from time to time.
Firemen who run into burning buildings; police who face criminals who sometimes are better armed than law enforcement.
There are the people who rescue refugees, those who work for peace, and military heroes who face unconventional enemies with a firm commitment to care for one another and liberate those who are oppressed.
But we often forget the obvious heroes among us — it’s the old “forest for the trees” phenomena. And by any measure, such a term ought to be applied to our educators.
President John F. Kennedy once referred to the media as the “last of the educated poor,” and he later amended that statement to include teachers, school leaders and administrators.
Let’s face it, we ask monumental things of teachers — we trust them with our children for the better part of the day, five days a week, nearly ten months a year. We ask them to infuse the minds of our young people with facts and figures that some of us have forgotten or, given the advances in society, never knew in the first place.
They are asked to keep abreast of new developments in math, technology, chemistry and the rest of the sciences. We want them to provide to our children an enthusiastic love for the written word, for poetry and the classics — whether they read them in book form or on some type of screen.
Our children are all the better for the efforts of educators, whose excellence in the Archdiocese of Louisville is well documented. This archdiocese has 20 U.S.
Department of Education Blue Ribbon Schools, and many others who are deserving. We represent ourselves well by taking the time each year to honor teachers and school administrators and even those graduates of Catholic schools who have made the stories of their lives tales of success.
A few weeks ago one of our unsung “heroes” announced that he was stepping down from his position as president of DeSales High School in Louisville’s south end.
It is not hyperbole to say that the decade the school has spent under Doug Strothman’s leadership has transformed the school. As a story in The Record announcing the retirement said back in June, the school will see more than 360 students walk through its doors this fall, the most it has had in nearly two decades.
A few years ago in an interview with this newspaper, Strothman said his goal was to provide male students in the South End a school with the academic amenities and athletic facilities that rival St. Xavier and Trinity high schools in central and eastern Louisville.
“We have two dozen or so students who drive by our school to get to St. X and Trinity every day,” he said then. “We want to entice them to give us a look, to stop and see what DeSales is all about.” We want them to shorten their drive to school, he said.
What those students see now is a school that, as a result of Doug Strothman’s leadership, now has it’s own true campus — an athletic complex with a football, soccer and lacrosse stadium, renovated classrooms, new science laboratories and an up-to-date technology infrastructure.
In a news release provided by the school upon the announcement of Strothman’s departure, which will come at the end of the 2017-2018 school year, David Price, chair of the school’s board, said that what the out-going president had done was nothing short of “the revitalization of DeSales.”
“What Doug has accomplished during his time at DeSales is truly remarkable,” Price said. “There is an enthusiasm and confidence about DeSales that goes beyond the obvious growth in facilities and enrollment. Doug always said he wanted to make DeSales into a place where every student becomes the very best version of himself — academically, spiritually and athletically. He has unquestionably delivered.”
Strothman joined the school in 2006 at a time when DeSales had relatively low enrollment and what appeared to lots of people a shaky financial future. All that changed in a remarkably short period of time. The school, established at 425 Kenwood Drive six decades ago, has never been in a better position than it is today.
That’s because it’s been led by one of our educational heroes. Chances are there is someone doing something similar for a Catholic school in your neighborhood. Someone who is working to make the school’s enrollment secure, to keep its technology up-to-date. It’s almost certain that there are teachers and principals in those schools working, in relative anonymity, to inspire as well as educate.
Take time to notice them. Our children need them, and if we value the future as much as we should, we must recognize that all of us need them too.
Children are, indeed, our future. Educational heroes will make sure that future is bright.
Glenn Rutherford
Record Editor Emeritus
