Kevin Avin reflects back on 40 years of educating boys

Above: Kevin Avin, Stuart Hall for Boys’ recently retired headmaster, said being present to students at morning drop-off and in school hallways was crucial in developing a rapport with his students and helping them navigate the school day. Above, Avin thanks students for their gift of a handmade birthday card. (Headshot of Kevin Avin by Frank J. Methe, Clarion Herald; all other photos courtesy of Stuart Hall School for Boys)

By BETH DONZE
Clarion Herald

Kevin Avin remembers the day his wife, Tootie, showed him the first Louisiana driver’s license she had been issued after the couple had moved from their native Mississippi to New Orleans for Kevin’s assistant coaching job at Jesuit High School.

Avin told Tootie that she would never have to get that license renewed, as the game plan for the two “young country kids” was to spend only a couple of years in Louisiana, then return to the familial comfort of their home state.

At least, that was the plan back in 1981.

“What we thought would be a couple of years turned into 40 years,” chuckled Avin, who served at Jesuit for the next 15 years in an array of positions, including European history teacher, prefect of discipline, director of admissions and an assistant football and baseball coach.

Avin, who left Jesuit in 1996 to become the second headmaster of Stuart Hall School for Boys, retired July 1 with the comfort of knowing Stuart Hall’s enrollment for the 2021-22 school year will be at its capacity of 350 students in grades pre-K3 through 7.

“We’ve put together a nice little gumbo with a lot of beautiful ingredients. This has been a ‘we deal,’ not a ‘me deal,’” said Avin, 63, of Stuart Hall’s tightly knit school community.

“You’re able to do a great deal in the life of a boy (at Stuart Hall) that I believe they’re buried with: the conviction of a boy – what he will believe in and what he will stand for, even when nobody else is joining him. (That strength of character) is placed in our students at such an early age, and it’s work we get to do with parents. It’s a beautiful partnership. I’ll miss that.”

Career began at Jesuit

Born in Gulfport, Avin grew up in Picayune in a devoutly Catholic family, attending public schools and marrying Tootie (birth name Cynthia), his high school sweetheart, in 1977. The Avins have four adult children and 15 grandchildren.

As he neared graduation from the University of Southern Mississippi with a degree in sports administration and a minor in history, Avin, a three-sport student-athlete, learned from a coaching mentor that Jesuit was looking for assistant football coaches.

Jesuit, then under the leadership of Jesuit Father Harry Tompson, gave the 23-year-old Avin a crash course in the education and formation of boys – the different ways that boys not only learned, but made friends, competed with their peers and bonded with adults. As Jesuit’s director of student activities, he witnessed the benefits of teaching the “whole child” by providing a full slate of extra-curricular activities, creating more than two dozen new clubs in special-interest areas such as baseball card collecting, fencing, ham radio and Japanese animation.

“Take the band,” said Avin, recalling his growing appreciation for non-athletic student opportunities. “They go to band camp in the summer, play all the way though basketball season, take part in spring competition and play the last sounds (of the school year) at Mass and commencement. They play the alma mater.

“To witness that as director of student activities was really enlightening for me. It enriched my respect for everything from debaters to the French Club and the Spanish Club.”

Carrollton Ave. school No. 2 

Stuart Hall, an independent, all-boys school established in 1984 and sponsored by the Archdiocese of New Orleans for nearly 20 years, came onto Avin’s radar in the early 1990s, during his tenure as Jesuit’s admissions director. Ten out of the 15 seventh graders from Stuart Hall’s first graduating class had applied to Jesuit, and it was Avin’s custom to visit the elementary school campuses of every applicant.

During a 1996 conversation with William Gallop, Stuart Hall’s founding headmaster, Gallop mentioned he was looking for an assistant head of school. Avin got the job, serving one year in the assistant’s role before advancing to headmaster in 1997, when Gallop accepted a new post in St. Louis.

Reversed student attrition

Avin’s first challenge was to stop the “bleeding” of student attrition. Enrollment had declined from 230 boys in 1994 and to an alarming 167. He met personally with every school family to reassure them of Stuart Hall’s potential.

“We got healthy pretty quickly; thank you, God,” said Avin, who by 1998 had shepherded Stuart Hall to accreditation from the Independent Schools Association of the Southwest (ISAS). By that time, the school had so many applicants, it could only accept 30% of those who wanted a spot.

To accommodate the growing demand, Stuart Hall created two sections of each grade in 2001 and set out to expand its campus facilities to serve them. In 2004, the Whelan Early Childhood Center opened, giving boys in grades pre-K3 through 1 a dedicated building. The following year, a multipurpose building with seven new ground-floor classrooms and a second-floor gym was completed.

Just eight days into those new digs, Hurricane Katrina forced the gutting of first-floor spaces, but 40 out of 44 faculty members returned to teach and enabled Stuart Hall to reopen on Nov. 7. Stuart Hall also managed to be recognized by the U.S. Department of Education as a Blue Ribbon School of Excellence during that challenging school year of 2005-06.

“Even 16 years removed (from Katrina), I believe the health of our school today still is attached to how that faculty came back and helped us reopen this place after 69 days,” Avin said.

Post-Katrina milestones include fully purchasing the school buildings from Carrollton Presbyterian Church in 2014 and installing the Benson Leadership Field, a turfed green space, in 2017.
Becomes a Catholic school

Named for Religious of the Sacred Heart Sister Janet Erskine Stuart, Stuart Hall was recognized by the Archdiocese of New Orleans as a Catholic school in 2003, with the blessing of Archbishop Alfred Hughes and in accordance with the wishes of the school’s overwhelmingly Catholic (90%) family base. Already infused with the spirit of the Religious of the Sacred Heart, thanks to Gallop’s 12 years as headmaster of the Academy of the Sacred Heart, the school lives out its Catholic identity through monthly Masses in the chapel, blessed by Archbishop Gregory Aymond in 2014 following its acquisition from Carrollton Presbyterian.
Even before being sponsored by the archdiocese, Avin had initiated a “Quality of the Month” program at Stuart Hall in which a different quality (friendship, compassion, thankfulness, peacemaking, courage, responsibility, perseverance and honesty) is highlighted for the entire student body, by an alternating grade, through drama, music, poetry and a themed Mass (since becoming sponsored by the archdiocese). A monthly “Honor Guard” – four students from each grade, nominated by their teachers as having lived the monthly quality – is introduced at a culminating service.

Value of all-boys setting

Avin, who also earned a master’s degree in education administration from the University of Holy Cross, said Stuart Hall’s dedication to placing everything around the needs of boys recognizes the ways that boys learn and develop differently from girls.

For example, girls tend to be wired into language arts – reading, writing and speaking – earlier than boys and even develop their fingertips earlier, Avin said. In response, Stuart Hall introduces cursive writing in second grade – a year later than most elementary schools. Avin said separating out boys in an educational setting  promotes “a confidence” among them when they take part in everything from making art to singing.

“If we put a little girl between every little boy (in a choir), you wouldn’t hear the boy voices,” Avin said. “They would go quiet, realizing that gender difference where girls are just typically expected to have prettier, better voices than boys. But when they’re separated out, they just sing and embrace it!”

Meeting boys where they are

Another boy-centered feature is a monthly “Literacy Lunch” that invites Stuart Hall fathers, grandfathers, uncles and other male role models to campus to read to the students.

“It’s important for boys to see adult men reading – and reading for pleasure – in lieu of just reading because I have to do this assignment,” Avin said.

Understanding that boys tend to be less verbally expressive than girls, Avin also made a point of greeting his students in the morning as a means of troubleshooting any stressors they may have experienced on the way to school. Slumped shoulders and downcast eyes might hint at a forgotten lunch, a lost assignment or something else, Avin said.

“I don’t know if he ran late, or breakfast didn’t go well, or there was upset in the home the night before, but you can pick up a lot of things in the body language of a boy,” he said. “If you can intercept it there and move him forward before he enters the gate, there’s a whole lot better chance his day is going to go better than it would have had you not been out there to (detect) it.”

Among Avin’s many points of pride are staffing Stuart Hall with a full-time reading specialist and two full-time learning specialists who help coordinate on-campus provision of any external speech, occupational and play therapy a boy might need; the chess team, which earned four consecutive state championships (and was on course for a “5-peat” until COVID gutted the season); multiple national Scripps Spelling Bee finalists; and enrichment classes in art, music, computer, lab, foreign languages (French through third grade, Spanish in fourth through sixth; and Latin in seventh).

“We academically fuel them in the morning (teach the core subjects)  – when their engines are revving and they are at their sharpest,” Avin said. “Enrichment classes are in the afternoon after they eat lunch and their metabolism slows.”

Praying for trust

Until about seven years ago, Avin was also a “teaching principal” who taught the history of the Catholic church in seventh-grade religion. His ministry of presence included walking the hallways and stepping into classrooms.

“I was blessed to be in a place where I had a vocation and not an occupation – I never said I was going to work one day of the 40 years of my career,” Avin said. “I was always ‘going to school.’ I had a vocation that aligned with my faith just beautifully.”

Although he and Tootie, parishioners of St. Dominic Church, have yet to map out their retirement, Avin got a reminder of how to navigate the unknown during a Manresa retreat – he will pray for trust.

“Life can really be simplified,” he said. “Pray for trust, pray for God’s plan to be lived out in your life, and invariably have the depth of trust in your faith that God would lead you and guide you and bless it. It’s that old adage: ‘If God takes you to it, he’ll bring you through it.’”

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