Who Is This Principal They Call “Mr. Fitz?”
Let me tell you a little more about my life story and my principal career so you can have confidence in knowing this blogger is indeed educated, faithful, and passionate about the topic of counseling parents (and teachers) to help them save their kids in today’s turbulent culture.
I was raised by my widowed mom as someone not far removed from a modest Leave It to Beaver life – save for the fact that unlike the Beav, I had no father since I was 4 years old. Born in 1961 during the initial run of the Leave It to Beaver TV show, I lived a humble, typical life as an innocent kid during a more innocent generation. My simple days consisted of shooting baskets on the homemade basketball hoop on our back patio, playing cops & robbers with toy guns, and my brother and me swimming at the local lake on our own…with no water wings on our biceps, no parent supervision, and even scarier, no sunscreen.
I was the youngest of five kids and my dad died of heart failure when he was only 46, and I was only four. The following year, even though now finding herself a poor widow, my staunch-Catholic mother made sure I followed my siblings by enrolling me in Sacred Heart Catholic school, in the Seattle suburb of Bellevue, Washington. All five of us Fitzpatrick kids attended Catholic elementary school, which is what almost all cradle-Catholics born in either the Silent Generation or Baby Boomer Generation (those born between 1925 – 1964) did.
Our mom did all the other traditional Catholic family things that were common with 20th Century families. She made sure we all went to Mass weekly, she started meals by having us bless ourselves with the Sign of the Cross and saying grace, and she hung a huge, framed portrait of Jesus on a prominent wall in our house. That Jesus picture was positioned in such a location that He was always watching you when you walked down the main hallway. I was never sure if my mom purposely hung it there as one way to keep us on the straight and narrow, at least while in view of the portrait. Additionally, my mom’s glow-in-the-dark rosary beads were always visible on her bedroom nightstand. Consequently, I was comforted as a youngster in the middle of a night after waking up from a nightmare when I would run to her room and the glow from the crucifix and the beads were the first thing I saw.
As many of his contemporaries did, my oldest brother contemplated the seminary, and both of my two brothers became altar boys – back in the day when there were no such things as altar servers since girls didn’t partake in this ministry. Regrettably, I didn’t become an altar boy. I believe the reason I chose not to was because to this day I still can close my eyes and from my church pew sitting alongside my mother, see my brother who was two years older than me faint at the altar when serving at a Mass. His face hit the marble altar steps and immediately blood started spraying from his crushed nose. It was truly surreal when the priest stopped Mass, turned to the congregation, and shouted, “Is there a doctor in the church?!” Two years later when I became the age eligible to join the altar boys, I declined. Surprisingly, I don’t recall my pious Catholic mother registering any objections to my decision. Perhaps she too could still recollect that time her second son face-planted on the altar and didn’t want a repeat showing with her third son.
After graduating from the eighth grade at my Catholic elementary school, my mom was informed I received a full-ride scholarship via the form of an anonymous donation from a classmate’s family who knew my mom could never afford the higher cost of a high school tuition. This generous gift allowed me to attend a Catholic high school in Seattle for my freshman year free of cost to my mom. After high school, I continued on to a Catholic university to receive a bachelor’s in education degree, followed a few years later to earn a master’s in education. With my Catholic school history and my Catholic family upbringing, no one was surprised when my first job found me teaching in a Catholic school.
Those first few years of teaching, when I became known by the moniker, Mr. Fitz, I taught everything from high school English to middle school religion to elementary school physical education. While only in my fourth year of teaching – in a grade kindergarten through eight Catholic school in Seattle – the principal asked me to become her vice-principal. I would continue teaching fulltime but would be assigned some vice-principal administrative duties to complete into the evenings. I found out later that I was chosen for this role because the Seattle Archdiocese had concerns with the principal’s leadership, and they saw in me a potential help – a respected, reliable, stable member of the faculty who was responsible enough to take on some of the principal’s load.
I recall one evening helping her with an administrative task of preparing for a large, all-school event and saying to a fellow teacher, “Why anyone would want to become a principal is beyond me. I would never want to be the one fully in charge!” There were many times that my future self as an overworked, overstressed school principal would kick me and scream, “Why didn’t I listen to the younger me!?”
I would be in this dual teaching/administrating role for just two years when the principal departed, and I was asked by the Archdiocese to become the school’s full-time principal. Being just 27 years old, I felt this was all too much too soon, so instead I chose a simpler position of becoming the full-time vice-principal at another Catholic school. Ironically, this other school in Bellevue – St. Louise – was the longtime rival of the Catholic school I attended as a kid – Sacred Heart. St. Louise was known as the poorer, younger sibling of its Catholic parish/school sister, with St. Louise’s families being more the blue-collar-type to Sacred Heart’s white-collar-type families. I used to loathe the St. Louise kids when we played them in CYO (Catholic Youth Organization) basketball; now I was going to be one of those St. Louisers. Actually, it felt like somewhat of a homecoming to come to work at the Catholic school that bordered my childhood school and that was just blocks away from the Kmart store and my father’s cemetery that my mom years earlier drove us kids to each Sunday. (More on that story in a future blog post.)
Only two-thirds into my first year as St. Louise School’s vice-principal, the principal announced she was departing at the end of the school year, and again the call was for me to step into the big shoes. I not only had the Archdiocesan Catholic Schools Department again asking me to take on this job, but now I had my St. Louise faculty pleading for me to say yes and sending a petition to the pastor and Archdiocese to hire me. Even with this pressure, I still was leaning toward saying no, as I kept hearing that voice in my head repeating from two years earlier, “Why anyone would want to become a principal is beyond me. I would never want to be the one fully in charge!”
However, after time in prayer and deliberation, I recalled that joke about God’s will that many of us had heard before:
A flood covered the street, so a man climbed up to sit on his roof to avoid the rising water. The water soon rose to the top of the house and was starting to reach the man’s knees. He prayed to God to save him. Minutes later, a boat with two people came by. They said to hop in, but the man said God would save him. The water was now up to his waist. A boat came with one person in it who said there was room, but the man said that God would save him. The water had risen to now be up to his neck. Then a boat floated up with no people inside, and the man thought it strange but stayed put as he believed that God would save him. The man drowned 10 minutes later and went up to heaven. Once there, he asked God, “Why didn`t you save me?” God answered, “What are you talking about? I sent you three boats!”
So, realizing that I just had my second boat float up to me, I took no chances that a third might come to me at some later date when I was older and had more experience under my belt. I said yes, hopped inside the principal-boat at St. Louise School, and became the youngest school principal in the Seattle Archdiocese.
It’s true what they say about the so-called honeymoon time in a new job. Being new and young and following the footsteps of the principal before me who was not widely liked by the school faculty, the expectations on me were low, and thus the pressure on me was very light. At the time during those first years as principal, I had believed my school administrator job came easily for me due to these reasons of low expectations and no pressure. However, looking back now, I realize that the main reason my 1990’s years as principal felt more relaxed and less stressful was because of the times in which we were. Anyone administering in the 20th Century, regardless of experience, had an easier time than administering in the 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s. The 21st Century’s turbulent times made it extremely difficult to educate children who were being profoundly influenced by secular society’s ever-increasing depravity and lies.
You can make a good case that the beginning of the 21st Century signaled the beginning of an evident and ever-increasing speed of a downward direction in our culture. We breathed a sigh of relief when we made it past the assumed-to-be catastrophic event of 12:00:01 a.m. on January 1, 2000, when all computers were supposed to fail, airplanes were supposed to start falling out of the sky, and society would collapse. Now as we are well into our second decade after that significant date, neither our airplanes nor computers are crashing, but our society is undeniably collapsing.
The culture going downhill and civilization starting to crumble correlated with moms and dads no longer taking their kids to church as before, let alone no longer staying together in what were supposed to be lifelong marriages. Furthermore, a crumbling society became evident when we saw too many teachers and parents striving to be friends to their students and kids instead of being the role models and firm-yet-fair overseers that the previous generation of adults were.
Moreover, the declining culture was linked to new concerns about children’s safety that weren’t around when I was young. Whereas my mom might have had to worry that I would catch a glimpse of a woman’s breast on the cover of the Playboy magazine hidden behind a store’s counter, today’s parents have to worry about their kids viewing hardcore pornography anywhere there is a computer, phone, or television. Additionally, today’s parents are overwhelmingly concerned of stranger danger – be it in-person or from online predators – while my mom’s only concern when I rode my bike all day for miles away from my house – without a phone in my pocket or a helmet on my head – was that I would be home before my dinner got cold.
With the culture going downhill and society speeding to a wicked mess, being a school principal became a tougher and more time-consuming job in the 2000’s and 2010’s than it was in the 1990’s. So, the early assumptions in my administration career that this job would get easier as I gained more experience did not come to fruition. In the final years of my 34-year career as a school principal, instead of having the luxury of easily administering with one hand behind my back and with my feet up on my desk as visions of a nearing-retirement danced in my head, I would have to arrive at school by 5:00AM so to give me two quiet hours before the teachers started arriving in the building just so I would have enough time to answer the literally one-hundred emails from parents and faculty that accumulated in my inbox over the past 12 hours.
These emails would often consist of fires to put out on incidents involving students cyber-bullying, sexting, or committing other bad actions that, believe me, were never the storyline of a Leave It to Beaver episode. Whereas a big issue I recall from my first years of being a principal was to remind parents that their middle school-age kids shouldn’t be staying up past 9:00 talking on the phone (on a landline with no texting invented yet), it had quickly progressed to my time-consuming issues being to explain to parents why Tik-Tok was not appropriate for second graders to view and why their eighth grade son was being suspended for sexting girls and asking for nude pictures.
I would also have to spend considerable amounts of time dealing with parents whose were confused about their purpose in life, believing their jobs were to insert themselves deeply into every aspect of their kids’ social, athletic, and academic lives. Parents in earlier eras understood their jobs were to lovingly raise and rear their children all the while focusing on the objective of setting them up to be independent, responsible adults themselves as early as when they turned 18. Too many parents in this current century fathom their jobs are to get involved in everything concerning their kids, including pushing aside any problems or roadblocks that their children encounter, which while making the road ahead smooth and easy for their youngsters, it has the negative effect of not creating mature and successfully independent kids.
A humorous explanation of the difference between parents in the 20th Century with those in the 21st Century.
Yes, there are still some outstanding parents today, reminiscent of the wisdom and grace displayed by Beaver’s dad, Ward Cleaver, but too often these days you’ll find our culture’s new type of parents are way less cooperative and much more confrontational. Whether their confrontations were with me or whether they were upset with a particular teacher, the amount of time I had to give to the principal’s job that had to do with dealing with parents’ complaints grew considerably in the second half of my career as compared to the earlier years.
Now, don’t think I’m putting all the blame on kids and their moms and dads for a school principal’s job becoming more difficult. Teachers have changed a lot since I first became a principal in 1988, and this has added to the list of struggles for today’s administrators. Like a mom or dad wanting to be seen in their child’s eyes as a friend more than a parent, there are teachers who find it more important to be known as the cool comrade whom kids like than to be known as the firm but fair teacher whose job is to improve students’ academic learning. When a teacher leans too much on the friend side and not enough on the professional educator side, there tends to be less learning and more discipline issues.
And in a Catholic school, teachers have the extra and actually primary responsibility to improve their students’ understanding of the Catholic faith, their students’ knowledge of Church history via the Bible and Tradition, and their students’ eagerness to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37). But unfortunately, as time progressed from 1990 to 2020, it became obvious that many of the newer teachers were not well catechized when they were younger, and thus didn’t know enough themselves about their Catholic faith to pass on knowledge accurately and confidently to their students.
Whereas a Catholic school principal in the 20th Century might even have religious sisters on his staff, let alone faithful, devout lay Catholic teachers who were raised in the more-religious Silent Generation and Baby Boomer eras, a Catholic school principal in the 21st Century often found himself with Generation X and Millennial Generation teachers who didn’t regularly go to Mass and didn’t have the knowledge or comfortableness with teaching Church doctrine or modeling a prayerful faith for their students.
Thus, I found myself in my later years on the job having to educate both parents and teachers on fundamentals of the faith. And with the culture becoming more and more secular and godless (but I repeat myself), I was not only dealing with ignorant people but had to fight over the noise the parents and teachers were getting from the media and society – such as the propaganda that the love-is-love mantra is a much more convincing reason to applaud so-called same-sex marriage than are these words of Jesus which denounce it:
“Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning made them male and female. For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh?” (Matthew 19:4-5)
I hope I was able to clearly introduce you to Mr. Fitz – a Baby Boomer kid raised as a so-called traditional Catholic during a more innocent era, graduated to the role of a Catholic school principal, and committed to the job of counseling Generation X and Millennial parents and teachers while overseeing Generation Z and Generation Alpha students, all the while dealing with a modern society’s deteriorating morality that is negatively affecting these parents, teachers, and children.
“Why anyone would want to become a principal is beyond me.”
(Mr. Fitz)
A PRINCIPAL'S PRINCIPLES FOR PARENTING 