Big man, big heart

By GAIL SCHONTZLER Chronicle Staff Writer

Ambling down the halls of Bozeman High School, Principal Godfrey Saunders is a big grizzly bear of a man.

NICK WOLCOTT/CHRONICLE Bozeman High School Principal Godfrey Saunders, who is known as a gentle giant to his students, helps a girl recover her bag after sprawling its contents across the sidewalk. It’s an image he’s well aware of. Saunders gave a great, hearty, rumbling laugh as he recalled an essay a boy once wrote about trembling at the sight of this imposing figure walking down the hall, until the student realized the man had a smile as big as his 6-foot-3 frame. “’You see it’s Mr. Saunders, and know everything’s OK,’” the boy wrote.

“I do feel I’ve been truly blessed to have had the opportunity to live most of my adult life in Montana, in Bozeman, and do what I’ve done,” Saunders said.

It’s hard to imagine Bozeman High without him. Yet after nearly 12 years in one of the toughest jobs in town, Saunders, 55, has announced he will retire in June at the end of this school year.

Saunders is not only principal of the biggest high school in the Gallatin Valley. He is also the most prominent black citizen of a predominantly white community n a man who has traveled a long way from his childhood in the racially segregated South.

The son of farm laborers, one of seven kids, he grew up in Florida in a family so poor, they didn’t have indoor plumbing until he was in the ninth grade. It gives him an added sensitivity for kids who are underdogs.

One afternoon right before the school’s winter break, Saunders stepped out of his office and chatted with a student about photography students offering their services to graduating seniors who can’t afford private photographers. He gave the girl a big smile and a hug.

He will leave the 1,853-student high school in great shape. It has strong academic records, dozens of trophies won by its athletes, speech-and-debate teams and music programs, and strong voter support.

Saunders is quick to say that such accomplishments are made possible by the students, teachers, coaches, parents and community n not by one individual.

Still, he has played a huge role in shaping the school’s character and the lives of individual kids.

“They all think Godfrey’s a real good guy, everybody really respects Godfrey,” said Cody Combs, student president. “He’s affected countless lives ... through his leadership and understanding.”

English teacher Jim L. Thompson said probably Saunders’ “most significant contribution to the school has been the warmth of the school climate.”

“I think the majority of the kids consider Godfrey a heroic figure. They know one way or another, he has overcome obstacles,” Thompson said. “It’s always, ‘Mr. Saunders is awesome’ or ‘Mr. Saunders is the man.’”

Damned if you do

It was Bozeman High’ prom night, and hundreds of teens in fancy dresses and tuxedos swarmed through the Strand Union Building ballrooms at Montana State University.

One tall blond girl, wearing a long gown showing a lot of cleavage, was screaming at Principal Saunders in the hallway.

You can’t kick me out, she screamed, her face red, arms flailing. Do you have any idea how much I spent on my dress, my hair? But she had flunked a breathalyzer test, and Saunders, frowning, stoic, was sending her home.

Saunders is a big guy with a big heart, who tends to be laid back about kids testing limits. He doesn’t get uptight when a student shows up at school with his hair in a spiked Mohawk dyed rainbow colors. When senior pranksters released a truckload of little pigs in the school, he laughed about how hard the pigs were to catch.

But he has been tough on life-and-death issues, taking a stern approach, for example, against end-of-school keggers.

In his time as principal, several students have died. Some have been faultless accidents, but the most notorious deaths were caused by car crashes linked to alcohol or drug use. At the 2000 homecoming dance, chaperones failed to catch a drunken student, who ended up flipping his car and killing a friend, which brought a lawsuit against the school. Two boys died in 2005, when police said they had alcohol and marijuana in their systems, sped down North 19th Avenue and caused a head-on crash.

So when conservative parents demanded a campaign to ban dirty dancing, Saunders saw it in that perspective.

“If a kid dies, if I miss a kid who’s been drinking, how someone is dancing will pale in comparison,” Saunders said. “My No. 1 priority is safety. The dirty dancers don’t cause me sleepless nights. If a kid dies n that’s a forever thing.

“They’re all tragedies,” Saunders said. “They all hurt. That’s a part of it that never leaves you.”

As principal, he has ridden in the ambulance with a student who took a drug overdose to offer the teen a familiar face and a hand to hold until the family arrived.

“I’ve watched day-care kids so moms could come to conferences for their kids,” he said. “There are kind of unwritten expectations of our job.”

Saunders has been criticized over the years. He was called a “communist” at a major School Board hearing, when he supported English teachers in keeping the controversial Native American novel “Fools Crow,” despite violent passages.

A student Hawk Tawk writer recently criticized a decision not to require all students to attend an assembly to honor a Bozeman High graduate killed in the Iraq War. Saunders responded that making it mandatory would have invited disruption, and the ceremony was “too important, too sacred,” especially for the family, to risk that.

Saunders has on occasion appeared to be overly sensitive, when he pulled or came close to pulling Hawk Tawk student newspaper articles over language or photos that, at least to Chronicle editors and reporters, seemed only mildly offensive.

Even school staff members who admire him said sometimes it seems Saunders tries hard to please everybody, in a job where that’s simply impossible.

“My mother used to say, ‘When you become an adult, there will be times you feel like an innocent person on death row,’” Saunders said. He laughed.

“Sometimes you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. All you can do is your best. ... I have my faults, I made my mistakes like anyone. I try to wear my heart on my sleeve, and do my best for kids.”

Promise kept

The day after Christmas, Saunders and his wife, Darcy, sat together on a big sofa in their living room, her fingers entwined in his big hand.

Their home is a 110-year-old farmstead off Cottonwood Road that they expanded to hold their family of five kids. Both homey and a showcase, it has a spacious Old World kitchen, antiques, paintings of the lavender fields of France that Godfrey loves, and big-window views of snowy mountains and the deer that wander through.

The deer are pretty safe. Though he’s a hunter and a gun nut, a striking figure at local gun shows, Saunders usually hunts birds.

The stunning house marks just how far Godfrey Saunders has come from his childhood in Fort Pierce, Fla., in the Jim Crow South.

Even within the black community, he started life at the bottom of the social heap. His dad had emigrated from the Bahamas during World War II when the United States needed laborers to pick Florida citrus crops.

“My family was very poor,” Saunders said. “My dad picked oranges and my mom was a field walker in the tomato fields.”

His parents had left school in the eighth grade because they had to work.

“School was very hard for me, I didn’t like it,” Saunders recalled. “I got in trouble a lot for going after kids who said things about my family.”

He said he became a teacher partly because “I wasn’t going to let what happened to me happen to other kids. I got teased and picked on a lot.”

He attended all-black schools for 11 years. Then in his senior year, the high school went through the turmoil of integration. Even today, separate class reunions are held for black and white alumni. He doesn’t attend.

At the movies, blacks had to sit in the balcony, derisively called the “crow’s nest” or “nigger heaven.” To buy ice cream cones at Dairy Queen, he had to go to the rear window. When his family went to a church that dared to integrate, police had to escort their car.

“As a kid I watched grown men banging on our car windows, yelling obscenities,” he said. “I used to ask my mom, ‘What color are people in heaven? Is there a black heaven and a white heaven, if all the souls are the same?’”

He picked oranges beside his dad and tomatoes with his mother. He might have ended up a farm laborer, too, but his folks said in the future machines would do such work. They urged him to stay in school.

“I promised my mother I would get an education,” he said. “She and I were very, very close.”

He promised he would go as far as he could in school.

“It was the only thing she ever asked n Take the gifts you have and do the best with them,” he said. “It was the greatest gift I could give her and Dad.”

In 2008, he earned his doctorate in education at Montana State University. His mother wasn’t alive to see it.

Still, he said, “I kept that 37-year-old promise.”

An American dream

A chance to earn a college degree and play basketball for Western Montana College in Dillon brought Saunders out to Montana, about as foreign a place as he could imagine.

“I came to Montana as a 17-year-old,” he recalled. “I’d never seen snow, I’d never seen a deer. I was fascinated.”

He chuckled. He and the other black college athletes joked that living in predominantly white areas, “When we walked into a store, we always got waited on.”

Saunders almost gave up on college, he once told Bridger students at graduation. He came home from Montana on the bus. His mother looked at him and said, “’I didn’t know I raised a quitter.’” So he got back on the bus and returned to college.

He graduated in 1976 and landed his first teaching job in 1977 in tiny Bainville, a community 35 miles north of Sidney, with a population of 300 and 34 high school students. He coached basketball and track. The Billings Gazette called to ask him what it was like to be the first black head coach in Montana.

“I just wanted a job,” he said. “They were willing to give me a job.”

In Bainville, he met Darcy, a fellow teacher and a Bainville girl, partly of French immigrant background and one-quarter Chippewa. She returned from a sabbatical in France to glowing reports about the new teacher.

“I was this free spirit, and I was never getting married, never having children,” she said and laughed. Then she met him.

“I think his gentleness appealed to me instantly,” she said. “Godfrey has a sense of grace and humility. I still think he’s the most honorable person I’ve met in my life. He always did the right thing, the honorable thing, for the other person more than himself.”

They got married when it was unusual, he said with understatement, for people from two cultures to marry. That was 30 years ago.

Together they had three children and adopted two more, saying they always wanted to adopt if they were able.

All five kids n Paige, Trent, Shae, Lee and Leslie -- graduated from Bozeman High, their diplomas handed to them by their father.

Now that the kids are grown and gone, the big house feels like the Saunders Hotel, Darcy joked. They’re ready to sell and downsize.

After 32 years in education, including 25 years in the Bozeman School District, Saunders is ready for a new chapter in his life.

I’m not retiring, I’m retooling, he said. He joked he might ride around on a Harley for a few months.

Nothing is settled yet, Saunders said, but he is interested in helping at-risk kids, maybe in an urban area outside Montana.

He’s being courted by a lot of people, said Darcy, who has a geriatric case-management business with 50 employees. And, she revealed with delight, their oldest daughter is expecting. They’re going to be grandparents for the first time.

The family is also getting ready for another celebration -- the inauguration of Barack Obama as the nation’s first black president.

Saunders went to see Obama last spring when the candidate held huge campaign rallies in Montana. On election night Nov. 4, he and Darcy watched returns at the Baxter Hotel, and shared hugs with many celebrants.

“I’d say to my kids I didn’t believe I would ever see a minority, a person of color or a woman, seriously contend for the presidency, let alone win it,” Saunders said. “To sit there and watch him ... I felt I’d come full circle in my life.”

He thought about his Jim Crow childhood, about Martin Luther King, about teaching school children that anyone can grow up to be president.

“I reflected back on my life, the life of my parents,” Saunders said. “It literally brought tears to my eyes. The ‘I Have a Dream’ speech n ‘I may not get there with you’ n It was like fulfilling that dream. That American dream.”

Gail Schontzler is at gails@dailychronicle.com or 582-2633.

Bozeman High School’s achievements during Principal Godfrey Saunders’ tenure include:

-- Only large (AA) high school in Montana in 2008 to make “adequate yearly progress” as required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

-- Highest portion of students testing at grade level or better in reading (90 percent) and math (70 percent) among AA schools in 2008.

-- Second-highest four-year graduation rate (87 percent) in Montana among AA schools.

-- 2006 Siemens Award for Montana for its rigorous, college-level Advanced Placement classes. Unlike some schools, Bozeman High opens AP classes to all students. They have achieved a pass rate of 85 percent.

-- Newsweek’s 2005 list of top 400 U.S. high schools.

-- Marching band performed in 1999 Rose Bowl Parade.

-- Voters haven’t rejected the school’s annual tax levy in 25 years. Three years ago they passed a record $36 million bond issue to renovate its aging buildings.

-- Saunders received a $25,000 Milken Family Foundation Award in 1999 as an outstanding educator.

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