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“I don’t think the Inspector’s going to be too happy.”
An altercation with the police is among the amusing stories the principal of SS. Peter and Paul School in the Bronx recently shared as she reflected on her 50 years in religious life, 45 of which have been spent at the school.
Sister Michelle McKeon, S.C., who celebrates her golden jubilee as a Sister of Charity this year, recalled how, as the daughter of a Deputy Inspector in the New York City Police Department, she attempted to rein in a group of rogue youths who approached the school yard her first year teaching at SS. Peter and Paul School.
The year was 1968. She was 23 years old.
“We were dismissing the kids and a gang came to the front of the school—they were looking for one of our eighth-graders,” she recalled, noting that the school is situated “within a throwing-of-a-rock distance to the 42nd precinct.”
Sister Michelle stood outside speaking with the gang, she said, “because they wouldn’t have hurt me as a sister,” and, at the same time, discreetly dispatched someone else at the school to the precinct “to get a blue uniform,” a policeman.
Unfortunately, the response from the 42nd was “you’re not in our precinct.”
“Eventually, the gang left because we sent the boy out the back door of the school, through the convent and his parents picked him up around the corner.”
And then began the then-novice teacher’s so-called altercation at the 42nd.
“I was so mad, I went to the precinct,” she recalled. “I said, ‘I want to speak to the captain.’ They said, ‘Aren’t you Inspector McKeon’s daughter?’ I said, ‘I am, but I’m also a teacher across the street and I could have been stabbed in front of the school because you wouldn’t send a uniform over.’ And then I said, ‘I don’t think the Inspector’s going to be too happy.’”
The captain agreed to see her, but she also told her father, who later paid a personal visit to the precinct. “In reality, we’ve always had a great relationship with the police department, we really have,” Sister Michelle added in earnest.
DROP CAP
Through the years, Sister Michelle has been told that as an educator, she’s “tough but fair,” she said.
She’s also accessible. This year, on the first day of school, a boy asked to speak with her privately. He was troubled because the night before he found out he was adopted.
In addition to her open door office policy, Sister Michelle also has lunch with the students. “I find out a lot more than I could even on the playground,” she said.
The oldest of five children, Sister Michelle is a product of Catholic education herself. A 1959 alumna of Incarnation School in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, she first heard the call to religious life as a fourth-grader, through her admiration for a Sister of Charity she befriended at the school.
She entered the Sisters of Charity of New York in 1963, after graduating from Aquinas High School in the Bronx.
She was 18 and had just broken off an engagement and nixed nursing school. “The Lord won out,” she said.
Perhaps it was providence, but her fiancé later became a priest, she said.
However, the nursing school never refunded her deposit, she quipped. And some people in the neighborhood bet her she would be back. “I never collected on the bet.”
Her youngest sibling, her brother and godson Michael, was a baby when she entered the congregation that September. “He was 13 months when I entered and he still wasn’t walking,” Sister Michelle recalled. “Then he came to see me in October. I had this crazy hat on my head and he didn’t recognize me. Oh, my heart was broken. He walked away from me, that’s how I know he was walking” by then.
Sister Michelle made final vows in 1972. “I really feel very much at peace, that I made the right decision,” she said.
The congregation’s charism resonates in her daily duties at school, she said, particularly in being “relevant to the children and families” and being mindful of the financial constraints of the respective families and the sacrifices parents make to send their children to Catholic school.
“I chose the Sisters of Charity, I really felt drawn to them, because they always wanted to work with the poor,” Sister Michelle said.
