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CHAPTER 4

A Life of Service—Not Far from Home

Mary Baier

“Saponaro, what do you think?” That’s how Mary Baier (formerly Mary Saponaro) remembers the beginning of a conversation she had with her teenage girlfriends about the possibility of becoming a nun. “I said, ‘I think I could do everything but obedience.’” Thirty-odd years later, Mary, who is now the acting principal and president of Paterson Catholic Regional High School in Paterson, New Jersey, and the director of all of the area’s Catholic schools, has no regrets. “I don’t know if I could just blindly say okay without questioning. My personality is such that I challenge.”

It would be a cliché to say that Mary is one tough broad. But it wouldn’t be far from the truth either. Paterson has some tough neighborhoods. The majority of Mary’s students are from single-parent backgrounds, and 85 percent live at or below the poverty line. When she gave a speech on her first day, telling the students she was excited to be “a part of the Paterson Catholic family,” she was met with boos and cackles from the audience. Some of the kids later told her she had no right to make such a claim, and she would have to “prove” she was a part of that family. That experience only seemed to make her more determined to succeed.

In high school, she remembers a conversation with a nun who told her, “You can’t always challenge; you have to accept.” Mary responded, “I accept so much of my faith, but that’s because we’re talking about God and the Church.” “What makes you so different?” she asked the nun pointedly. Looking back, she says, “Ohhh, it got me in trouble.”

It’s hard to imagine how Mary, with her no-nonsense black suit and white blouse, could have gotten to where she is without the instinct to challenge. Not that she was much of a rebel, she emphasizes. Having grown up in a Catholic enclave in Bayonne, New Jersey, she looks back fondly on her childhood. “You had your home family and you had your school family.” And the transition between the two was almost seamless. Her family went to church every Sunday for 9 o’clock Mass. “If you didn’t go to 9 o’clock, you had to have a note for the nun the next day in school.” With regard to discipline, she recalls, the parents and the teachers were always on the same page. “If you did something wrong, you went home and Mom would always say, ‘What did you do wrong?’ It was never ‘What did that nun say to you?’” In one of her classes, there were 52 students and one teacher, and never a significant discipline problem.

Mary went to Saint Peter’s College, then on to New York University for a master’s degree in public policy, but she completed her graduate degree at Fairleigh Dickinson University with a concentration in educational leadership, an experience she found “eye-opening.” She began to realize that there was a big world out there. “I met diversity,” she remembers, laughing a little. “It was very intriguing to meet people of different faiths and cultures. And some people didn’t believe in God. Some people were indifferent to God. Some people didn’t have a God. But they were good people, you know?” She had heated discussions with friends from all backgrounds. Ultimately, all of this arguing and challenging led her to think she was meant to become a lawyer.

She applied to law school but didn’t end up going. Instead, she met her husband. Only a few short years later, her two sons led her back to the world of Catholic education. When her eldest son, John, began kindergarten at a suburban Catholic school, she recalls that “of course, I volunteered for everything. Everything you could do at that school, I did.”

Eventually, Mary took a teaching position at her sons’ elementary school, an institution she came to love even more than the one she had grown up in. “It seemed warmer. It didn’t seem so detached. The Franciscan charisma was so different. They’re very warm, very humble. I was so taken by that. You get enveloped into a faith community.”

Whatever the community gave her, she seemed to want to give back in spades. There were small things at the school, things she hoped would change, and she was getting antsy waiting for it to happen. She remembers her frustration with the “complacency” of some of her colleagues. So she started to make suggestions. The nun who was the principal at the time said to her, “Mary, if you really want to effect change, you should start thinking about a leadership role.”

Being a principal never entered Mary’s mind, she says, until she heard those words: effect change. “I was happy to be doing really well with my ministry and having a fine family.” But then it hit her: “I wanted to effect change.”

There was another reason that Mary said she hadn’t considered a leadership position prior to that moment: “My principals up to that point had all been nuns.” Until then, she had never considered the possibility of a layperson being the spiritual and educational leader of a Catholic school. Now Mary Baier exemplifies how a layperson can successfully “effect change” as the leader of a Catholic school.

She says that she knew she “wanted to be in an environment where I can be the best I can. And that’s in a faith-filled environment.” She participated in a leadership program run by the Archdiocese of Newark. She served 10 years on the school advisory board for the archdiocese as well. Finally, Mary shadowed a principal for six months before taking on a job as principal in a suburban area for five years, then later as a principal in Jersey City.

Her days are long and hectic, and there is always a new challenge. She is in the building long hours, making sure everything is running. She is there to greet the kids. “You’re always visible and accessible to them, and you get to know them. And your faculty too. That’s part of your family.” Then you begin to address the problems that come up—a problem with a student, a problem with maintenance. Is there a parent waiting to see you? Then she makes calls to benefactors and to pastors and to the priests of the local parishes to keep in good contact with the community. After school, she has faculty meetings. And in the evenings, there is always an activity as well. The night before, Mary had a basketball game to attend, and the night before that, she was at the cathedral with her students singing vespers for the religious communities.

She is worried not only about personnel and community matters but also about finances. When faced with a growing budget crunch at her last school, she helped to open up a Montessori early-childhood program. It started with 15 students and had 210 by the time she left. “That program allowed the elementary school to be vibrant because the early-childhood program funded the school.” That, she says, was one of the most rewarding episodes in her career.

Looking back, she realizes this was not a position she would have wanted or been able to fulfill well when she had young children at home. “You have to be careful because it can suck you right in. You could be here day and night even if you have a husband and small children.” Now that her children have grown, though, she doesn’t mind the hours.

The job is always pushing her in new directions. Later in the week, she was going to the First Calvary Church. She had previously arranged a meeting with a local pastor in an effort to recruit more students from the African-American churches, “and he said, ‘Well, why don’t you come preach?’” So she said yes. What is she planning to say? “I am going to talk about family and children first. I will quote Scripture about family and children and connect with them on that level. I am going to talk about why it’s important for his congregation to think of this school as a very viable option for their kids.”

It is more than a viable option. Despite the depressing statistics about the neighborhood environment, 94 percent of Paterson Catholic graduates go on to college. As much as Mary is a believer in Catholic education because of the results it produces (at a cost much lower than that of public schools, she is quick to add), it is the faith in Paterson Catholic High School that makes it distinctive and so successful.

“This is not a job; it’s a ministry,” she says more than once during our conversation. “You have to be passionate about your faith as well as the field of education. You have to understand mission. Because there’s a need to be here. You have to understand that need. It’s challenging. It’s rewarding. It’s about the children and doing God’s work for the children.”

In fact, she’s often doing the work not just of God, but of parents. Many of her students live with only one parent, and some have been left with members of their extended family and no parents at all. Not having a “family unit,” Mary believes, makes building a foundation for the kids even more difficult. Too often, the role falls to her teachers and administrators. “You have them for more hours than their own parents have them,” Mary observes. And so it’s all the more important to be in an environment that emphasizes core values. “To not be able to say to someone, ‘God bless you.’ ‘Let’s pray.’ With all the destruction that goes on in the world every day, that we can’t come together in prayer and face it. To be void of saying, ‘Thank you, God.’ ‘God help us.’ I mean, that’s not something I could deal with.”

In one way, Mary Baier ended up right back where she started—in Catholic schools. But the contrast between the schools Mary attended and the ones she leads today could not be starker. For instance, she can’t even remember having a layperson for a teacher until she was in high school. Today, Paterson Catholic has a single priest chaplain and one nun who teaches math. The rest of the faculty and administration consists of laypeople.

Back when Mary was growing up, the surrounding community shared the values of the school. Today, that’s not always the case. When they walk through the doors of her school, says Mary of her students, they have safety and security and a faith-filled environment. “But we still send them back out there. And it’s not a faith-filled environment. And it’s not safe and it’s not secure. It’s survival mode when they leave our doors.” A look of deep concern spreads over Mary’s face as she describes what she sees as her students’ “double lives.”

The challenges of leading an inner-city Catholic school are not just the result of outside influences. Mary sometimes has parents and guardians in her office complaining about the way she and her teachers have handled a problem student. She recalls an incident earlier in the year in which a student was repeatedly getting in trouble. The parents’ response, she says, was, “We pay tuition, so we’re entitled to tell you this is what you want.” She had several meetings with them but felt they were talking in circles. After careful consideration and prayer, she said to the parents, “We seem to be almost confrontational. But I want what’s right for your daughter, and you want what’s right for your daughter.” So the three adults turned to the young woman and finally got her to talk about what was behind her behavior. Together, they found out she was being bullied and helped her to fix the problem.

Mary reflects on the incident. “I would have just loved to have said, ‘You know what? This is just not the school for you. I just think you need to go.’ That would have been easier.” In another position, in another environment, she says, she might have been dismissive. It’s so much harder to work at these problems, “but that’s what real leadership is.” Now she regularly sees those parents, and they are very friendly with Mary after realizing what they have in common: the children.

Someone with Mary Baier’s schedule, someone faced with the kinds of problems she faces—well, it would be easy to understand a certain kind of dismissiveness. Indeed, it could just seem like a necessary sort of efficiency. But Mary is committed to thinking and praying over her decisions.

“It’s how we react to different situations that our leadership is seen first and foremost. You can go either way with a situation.” But that is where her Catholicism has affected her. “It’s because of your faith that you know what you need to do, in spite of what you might want to do.”

Becoming the head of an urban Catholic school has made Mary’s faith “stronger.” It has made her “more understanding, more accepting, more respecting of the things in your life.” She takes less for granted now. “I am thankful for the gifts and blessings God has given me. My family first, my faith, my friends.”

Mary is a very upbeat person, very energetic, but she can slow down to reflect too. Her journey has not always been a smooth one, she laments. After 28 years of marriage, her husband and she divorced. “I am not married anymore,” she says with profound sadness. “Does it break my heart? Yes. Do I believe in marriage? Absolutely.”

While many people may throw themselves into a job in order to get over the pain of emotional loss, Mary doesn’t seem to be running away from anything. Her ministry, she says, has even helped her to remain faithful. She says that she can’t let circumstances change her or make her more negative. “It’s much harder to stand up, to be forgiving of myself and of my sons’ father and to get on with life and want him to be happy. It’s hard to turn the other cheek. But you need to do it.” Mary readily admits that she is no saint. But she prays every day. “I pray for forgiveness, I pray for adoration, I pray for thanksgiving.” And she tells me that the positions she has taken in Catholic education have helped her be a good model to her sons.

It is clear that the satisfaction she derives from her position comes from the love of her students. “The kids are so worth it. They have a lot of attitude, but they’ve got heart and soul.”

She tells me that one of her students, a senior by the name of China, came in to talk to her one day. “I’m like a jelly bean,” she told Mary, “I’m hard on the outside but gushy and mushy on the inside.” Maybe China’s on her way to becoming a Catholic school principal too.