The Good Book and the Bad Book
At Austin’s elite St. Andrew's Episcopal School, everything from the architecture to the emphasis on tolerance is designed to reinforce a sense of community. But when an English teacher had her senior class read Brokeback Mountain, a fight between parents over the true meaning of Christian values threatened to tear the close-knit campus apart.
(Page 3 of 5)
“I think the word ‘Christian’ has been captured,” she continues. “Maybe in some people’s minds a Christian school would not teach Brokeback Mountain. In my mind, being Christian is in how you treat people. I think it’s important to open up the world like Kimberly does. What we’re hoping will happen is kids will learn about the world, its hurt and its brokenness, and then go out and try to make it a better place.”
She was raised Episcopalian in Waco, the state’s Baptist capital, and likes to joke that she had to learn to spell her denomination’s name for herself. She graduated from the University of Texas in 1959, then spent three years using Bible stories to teach English at an Episcopal school in Japan. She returned to Austin to study at the Episcopal seminary, thinking that would make her a better teacher. There she met and married another seminarian, Phil Nazro, and in 1966 became the first woman to graduate from the school. She did not become a priest; another eleven years would pass before the Episcopal Church started ordaining women. But Phil was ordained, and the two of them spent the next fourteen years running churches in Texas and Florida and raising four kids. In 1980 Lucy took the head-of-school job at St. Andrew’s, and the family moved to Austin.
At the time the school taught 298 kids in grades one through six and was thought by many to offer the best elementary education in Austin. One of Lyndon Johnson’s daughters had gone there, and during Nazro’s tenure so had the Bush twins and Michael Dell’s kids. When Nazro arrived, a consensus already existed to add junior high classes. Parents saw a marked decline in the quality of learning when their kids moved to public middle schools. The only option at that time for further Episcopal education was St. Stephen’s, a seventh-through-twelfth-grade school with a boarding component that St. Andrew’s parents felt precluded the kind of community they wanted. At St. Andrew’s, the students’ moms were fixtures on campus as volunteers during the day, and after school the families entertained one another in their homes and met new teachers at Nazro’s house on campus.
St. Andrew’s purchased land adjacent to the original classrooms in 1981, and the middle school opened a year later at a cost of $500,000, a pittance compared with the $18 million price tag for land and construction of the upper school sixteen years later. The presence of older kids offered Nazro an opportunity to build on one of the school’s key Episcopal
tenets: the idea of service. Younger kids had always taken part in activities like food drives, but the older kids were able to perform more-personal acts. “We take the kids into the community two days a week,” Nazro says. “They’ll go do some tutoring at an elementary school or help at a nursing home.”
Religious instruction was limited to the mandatory daily chapel services and a seventh-grade theology class taught by Nazro. Some parents complained that that was not enough, but others gave thanks. This was not a school where students learned that the square root of nine was three because that was part of God’s plan.
I first encountered St. Andrew’s and Nazro in the spring of 1990, when I coached the boys’ basketball B-team. The A-team had the kids who could actually play; I took the kids who wore jeans to practice and had nicknames like Shorty. Nazro showed up at many of the practices, and we visited a few times. But mostly she spoke with the players, and judging from their casual way with her, I figured that getting close to them was a big part of how she ran her school.
That is not my only connection to St. Andrew’s. The Nazros knew my father, an Episcopal priest who started teaching at the seminary shortly after they left. He was friendly with both of them, as he was with the chaplains at St. Andrew’s—most of whom had been his students—and many of the parents. When he died, in 2002, a family donated a piano to the school in his name. If he had still been alive when the controversy began, he likely would have been involved. One of his roles in Austin’s Episcopal world was to mediate disputes within churches, which often involved the denomination’s openness to gays. My dad’s approach was similar to Nazro’s: Bring the two sides together, insist they show each other respect, and encourage them to agree to disagree but ultimately adhere to the church’s position of tolerance.
None of that was on Nazro’s mind when the upper school opened in 1998, though she was already finding ways to expand the school’s Episcopal identity. St. Andrew’s began requiring two days of community service a week for freshmen and sophomores and offered an elective of one hundred hours of community service for juniors and seniors, including one 2-week project in a community dramatically different from their own. Nazro also felt a responsibility to introduce Episcopal values in the classroom. These kids were mature enough to grasp the ideas. The humanities department was the place to do it.
Charlie Cook, a friend of the Nazros’ from their days at the seminary—he’s an esteemed professor there now—has consulted with Lucy throughout her tenure, and he describes the Episcopal philosophy that informs humanities classes: “Think of a dirt road. The toughest place to make your way is right down the middle. If you can get in the ruts on either side, everything will be smooth. The middle is where the weeds and the rocks are. That’s where you’ll have to slow down and think about how you’ll deal with those obstacles. Life’s a whole lot easier when it’s black and white. The Episcopal Church deals with grays. And that makes some people uncomfortable.”
It was probably inevitable that, as Episcopal thought assumed a larger place in the classroom, the growing pains the school felt would concern the discomfort Cook describes. Ultimately Brokeback was assigned to some kids with parents who, like the McNairs, practiced a faith that couldn’t be reconciled with the Episcopal view. Some critics claim that St. Andrew’s never advertised its Episcopal grays, that parents like the McNairs were misled. Kate says she just misunderstood. Either way, the school’s supporters say that once the family realized the school was not what they wanted, they should have quietly taken their children elsewhere.
That was not how Nazro felt. “I would never say, ‘Go somewhere else,’” she says. “I wanted us all to be under the same tent, but I couldn’t pull it off.
“I wish people were open to the possibilities this story gives families to talk. Parents can say, ‘I don’t agree with this being on the curriculum, but you’re about to go off to college, and you may read something like this there. You will come across people different from you. And I want to be here to talk to you about that now.’ Some of our parents did that, and it was good for them to put their own value systems around it.”
But some families had value systems with no place for a book like Brokeback. Nazro was never going to be able to make those people happy.
Do not behave as a collective group of clueless and ignorant smiling sycophants, convinced everything has always been perfect, always is perfect, and always will be perfect before your school is ruined by an administration that gives a blank stamp of approval to curriculum, then shields those who elicit controversy behind its skirts, eschews debate, and discourages dialogue all the while hoping problems will eventually go away if ignored, intimidated, or patronizingly smiled upon.—from Ron and Mary Ann Bowling’s letter to the St. Andrew’s board of trustees, January 20, 2006
WHEN THE BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN CONTROVERSY BEGAN, Ron and Mary Ann Bowling, self-described “hardheaded Lutherans,” had already seen their son graduate from St. Andrew’s, but their three daughters were still enrolled there. Strong in their faith, the Bowlings were already concerned about the school. Mary Ann had objected to a showing of the PG film Holes in her third-grade daughter’s class in 2004 and to a field trip the class took to a Hindu temple the next year. But her protests didn’t have near the impact of the McNairs’ withdrawn pledge.
The Bowlings are not like the McNairs. Though Mary Ann volunteered at the school, she and Ron, who owns a construction company, did not run with the St. Andrew’s crowd, nor were they major donors. He is a big, good-looking guy with a dark mustache that shows some gray, and he favors low-crowned ball caps. Mary Ann, a petite blonde with a long, pretty face and pale blue eyes, helps Ron with the company. When I met them in their two-story limestone house not far from the upper school, we talked at a cluttered breakfast table next to a busy kitchen; son Jeremiah has gone to college, but the three Bowling girls, Rachel, Hannah, and Abby, are still home. The Bowlings are a solid family and seemed like sweet people, but on the topic of St. Andrew’s, which is all we discussed, they could not hide their anger. It appeared to have been a long while since they’d tried.
As the McNair flap started to blow up in the summer of 2005, the Bowlings’ oldest daughter, Rachel, was preparing to begin her senior year and was assigned to Ms. Horne’s class. Knowing that Rachel was going to read Brokeback Mountain, Mary Ann read it first. “And I thought, ‘This is a really stupid book.’ Obviously, it’s teaching you about homosexuality, but that’s not the issue. It’s poorly written, and, if anything, it made me less sympathetic to these two guys. They don’t pay attention to what they ought to be doing, which is tending the sheep, and you get the feeling that if the other person wasn’t there they’d be doing it with the sheep. They don’t seem connected to each other. And then they don’t even have the guts to—I mean, they both take wives? So now they screw up other people’s lives? I was just like, ‘I don’t get why the school is using this book.’”
My Library
