SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) - Let’s start the way Tom Lorang always starts, with a question.
Do we want to know how the son of a car salesman - the middle of eight siblings growing up poor but happy in 1940s and ’50s Hartford - emerges from meager beginnings to forge a Catholic school system that the rest of the nation wants to emulate?
No? Well that makes it easy then, doesn’t it, Lorang likes to say, a smile at his lips as he quickly adds, “Let’s all go home.”
But if the answer is “yes” - and the answer always has been “yes” whenever Lorang has asked those who share his vision if they want Catholic education to continue in this community - all right then.
Next question: How do we get there?
How do we get to the heart and grit and leadership of a man whose parents saw their farming dreams disintegrate in the Nebraska dust storms of the Dirty Thirties? Whose older brother, Ray, died in the Vietnam War era? Whose faith started him down a path to priesthood but led him on a transformational journey instead?
For that matter, how does this guidance counselor lead a community across the bridge from a rich, centuries-old system of priests and nuns in the classroom to the other side and a new world of lay teachers who need more than garden vegetables or a half-beef for their pay?
And this question, maybe the most important one: How does this 70-year-old architect of one of the nation’s most studied Catholic school models slip into retirement now without any more of the team-building and consensus-reaching that has defined him?
“Shame on me if I don’t get that figured out,” Lorang says in his office at the O’Gorman Junior High complex. “We’ll figure it out. What’s a great retirement look like? What should it look like? We’ll assess that.”
We’ll follow the process, he says. And there’s your answer.
For more than 23 years now, until July 1 when Robert Wehde becomes just the second superintendent of the Sioux Falls Catholic Schools, the stoic Lorang has been at the forefront of this “process” that has created a $15 million unified system with 2,700 students spread across a high school, a junior high and six elementaries.
Of course, he won’t take credit for any of it. Never has and never will. He seldom utters an “I.” It’s always “we.”
A faith-filled man, he will insist that it was God who gave him the skills to write a doctoral dissertation on running a Catholic school system that some would argue is the blueprint for just exactly what Sioux Falls’ Catholic schools have done - and now what other Catholic systems across the country are replicating as well.
God put him in the right place at the right time, Lorang said, calling him here in 1978 from 12 years of guidance counseling and coaching in Yankton to become O’Gorman’s first lay principal and to influence however he could the culture of an education system with the Catholic underpinnings he so embraced.
It never has been about him, he will tell you. And should that truism ever waver, well, there’s a framed image on a shelf in his office to bring him and everyone else back.
The photo of Lorang and two others from O’Gorman is from 1985, at a White House gathering where the school was honored by the U.S. Department of Education for its excellence in private education. It’s a point of pride, to be sure, but also a reminder to the intensely humble Lorang about how the local media back then tried to suggest that the young principal somehow was the story.
“This is the first time I’ve ever said anything out loud about this,” he said, and suddenly there’s bit of emotion in his voice. “But I made up my mind that day that the story would never be about me again. The story should have been about us and what we’ve been allowed to do and what we’ve accomplished.”
Accomplished? Where do you begin recounting the highlights of a system and a man mutually intertwined and transformed by the tides of history, faith and timing?
In Lorang’s case, you go back to Hartford, to a country emerging from the Depression, and to Ted and Margaret Lorang as they began anew with their growing family after the grasshoppers and the rolling walls of dirt had dashed their farming dreams in Nebraska.
Ted Lorang went to work as a car salesman in nearby Sioux Falls. His wife, when not mothering their five boys and three girls, spent grueling days standing at a local produce house as she examined poultry eggs under a light - what they call candling.
“I didn’t even know we were poor until much later,” Lorang recalled of his childhood. “And another thing is, I didn’t appreciate nearly as much as I should have how hard my parents worked because they never complained, ever. They were never victims.”
The Lorang boys were athletes - football in the fall, basketball in the winter, track in the spring, baseball each summer. Tom Lorang trained year-round, his younger sister, Jean, said. But she saw much more than just the competitive nature in her brother.
Young Tom liked to read - and still often buries his nose today in a good Tom Clancy or John Grisham novel. He took his studies seriously in his youth, too, his sister said. And he was spiritual - no surprise considering the Lorangs’ strong Catholic convictions.
But there was something else about Tom that would reveal itself to Jean Lorang and portend the life that awaited him.
“He was a senior in high school when I was an eighth-grader,” she said. “And I would go to talk to Tom about things or for advice, and he would just always take the time. His heart and mind were so open to what you would bring, and I could trust him with what I brought. It wouldn’t have surprised any of us that he became a guidance counselor.”
For a time, they thought he might become a priest. Jean Lorang remembers the night her brother came home and asked the rest of his siblings to step out so he could talk privately to his parents about going to the seminary.
He had been working as a meatpacker at John Morrell out of high school, taking a few college classes in town, looking for direction. When he went off to St. Mary’s Seminary in Winona, Minnesota, to see whether that direction was the priesthood, it took about a year to find an answer.
Turns out, God wasn’t calling him to lead the flocks, Lorang discerned. No, God asked him to work with youth.
Actually, for a time in the mid-1960s, Lorang thought God and his own heart were nudging him toward Vietnam.
“I was considering it,” he said. “But then people my age and older, they can kind of remember when that was a patriotic thing to do.”
But that notion died in 1965 with his brother, Ray, who was less than two years older than Tom Lorang and was perhaps the youngest Navy pilot in Vietnam when his plane was shot down and his body lost to the seas below.
“My parents would have never said ’no’ to anything I wanted to do,” Lorang said. “But it would have been tough, tough on my parents if I had done that, gone off to Vietnam. So I didn’t.”
He earned a degree in guidance counseling instead, followed quickly by a master’s and education specialist degrees - all while he was coaching and counseling youths in the Yankton schools.
Lorang arrived at O’Gorman in 1978 as assistant principal, moving up a year later to principal, at a transformational time for Catholic education in the U.S. Sioux Falls was a community of independently operating parish schools, individual kingdoms with their own administrations, salary structures and school boards.
Then, a young principal such as Lorang would negotiate salaries with his teachers one person at a time, said O’Gorman activities director Steve Kueter, who also came to the high school in 1978.
“There was no salary schedule,” Kueter remembered. “He set up a time, you’d go in, you’d sit down and he’d tell you, ’This is what we’re going to pay you next year.’ Only Tom could pull that off.”
The days of a nun teaching five sections of science on no salary were coming to an end. The lay teachers hired to replace them needed to be paid. And it wasn’t unusual for a third-grade instructor at one Catholic elementary school to be earning 30 percent more than a contemporary teaching the same class at another school.
Bishop Paul Dudley saw what was going on. Local priests such as the Revs. Bob Flannery and Don Kettler did as well. The principal at O’Gorman had all this research he had done for his dissertation, from studying the importance and effectiveness of Catholic education to the financing and governing of it. So they called for a meeting.
“Tom was instrumental in all that,” said the Rev. Chuck Cimpl, the pastor at St. Michael’s parish and a part of those early discussions. “He was not a person that came in and said, ’I’ve got the vision, you better get on board here.’ It was more like: ’Let’s talk about it. Let’s work out what our vision is together and what we want to accomplish together.’ “
How do we get to where we want to go? Lorang asked the question and brought together priests, parishioners, school boards and community business leaders and turned them into committees to find answers.
Years later, when the system was up and running and had to raise money for teacher pay, student financial aid and the modernization of its facilities, Lorang returned to the process.
He started the conversation this way: Do we want Catholic education in Sioux Falls 50 years from now? Yes? Then how do we get there?
You hold a lot of meetings with an approach like that. You gather data and form committees and consider every opinion.
“Everyone has to have a voice. That’s how he operates,” Kueter said. “Tom doesn’t make snap decisions. He has to get a lot of information from stakeholders, and take a lot of time talking to a lot of people before he moves forward.”
They settled on a fundraising campaign called Building on Excellence that was projected to bring in $15 million. When it ended a few years ago, the final tally was $55 million.
In Lorang’s mind, the absolute key to such success is building relationships, whether interacting with a student or teacher or asking a businessman for a contribution.
So as principal and later as superintendent, he made it his mission to seek out others, to get to know them in casual, nonthreatening situations.
“If you have a positive encounter with someone, a student, an employee, you build a relationship of trust,” he reasoned. “I never wanted to have a negative encounter with a student or teacher or whoever before I’d had a chance to build a positive relationship with them. Then if we do have to deal with something, say, inappropriate behavior or whatever, it’s not a personality conflict. It’s not, ’You don’t like me’ or ’I don’t like you.’ It’s us, talking.”
That’s how Lorang was able to sit down with huge factions in the Catholic community - conservative and liberal - and find common ground, Kueter said. “Tom can work with those people,” he said. “He can bring them together.”
He might have been the brightest, most intellectual presence in the room during any of those discussions, friends say. But no one would have known that, they added, because he also probably was the most humble, most grateful person there as well.
“He always exuded this sense of gratitude,” said state Sen. Phyllis Heineman, a friend of Lorang’s who served on the first school board of the new Catholic school system, was its president at one time and sent her children through its doors.
“Whether it was the bishop, the priests, the parents, the students or teachers, he was grateful for all of them,” Heineman said. “And that gratitude just seems to permeate the system today.”
So now what? What becomes of a man who took a menagerie of parish schools and turned them into a system that celebrated 46 students this year with grade-point averages of 4.0 or better, as well as 40 scores of 30 or better on an ACT test where 36 is perfection?
How does a man who never stayed away more than a week from any job he’s ever had for the past 55 years find meaning and purpose in retirement?
Well, expect to see him in all of his usual spots at Catholic school functions - back house left in the performing arts center named for him and his wife, Penny, at O’Gorman; in the balcony of the school gym for basketball and volleyball and wrestling; or in his chair on the roof of the press box at McEneany Field for football and track events.
Expect him to spend more time visiting daughter Janet and her family in Omaha. To listen a little longer to the Irish ballads that are the music in his life. To reacquaint himself with a golf course or two again, or some of South Dakota’s fishing waters.
There will be consulting work in the months and years ahead, too, Lorang said. Nothing to the point that he needs to print out business cards, but he’ll stay busy, even if he can’t help but miss the days when every important decision in his life began with a question.
These days, in thinking about it and studying it and analyzing it, “I’ll figure out retirement,” he promised.
But in the next introspective breath, as he pondered what he was leaving behind, he added this:
“I’ll miss …” and his words drift off before he finally extends his hands and says, “this.”
“I’ll miss the mission, the journey we’re on,” he said. “When you get to a point where, here we are, and I’m not going to have the time or opportunity to dive in and help make it better, or make it right, and that’s my whole life. That’s the challenge. I’ll miss that.”
For a moment at least, he will miss it. Then there will be a question, followed by a process and an assessment on how to get from here today to there in Tom Lorang’s tomorrows, wherever that might be.
That, say those who know him best, never will change.
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Information from: Argus Leader, https://www.argusleader.com
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