There’s still evidence of the old "Rocky" Souza from Pauoa Valley — a girl who danced at the prom and loved to surf — in Sister Joan of Arc Souza, the principal of Saint Francis School, who most likely saved her alma mater from extinction.
Souza is celebrating her 50th reunion with 21 other members of Saint Francis’ class of 1961 at the annual alumni luau on the Manoa campus today.
"‘Rocky’ is alive and well. I don’t think I’d be here after 20 years if Rocky wasn’t here," said Souza, who transformed the former all-girls Catholic school into a college preparatory academy, in an interview Monday.
She was given the nickname as a kid because her real name, "Rochelle," means "little rock" in French, and she was a tomboy whose favorite toy was a chemistry set. The "Joan of Arc" label is the baptismal name Souza chose when entering the convent, because she was fascinated by the saint who led French soldiers to battle in the 1400s, opting to burn at the stake rather than deny hearing heavenly voices.
Although she led the life of an average teenager who loved wearing jeans, going on dates and enjoying sports and proms, she says she always heard the call from above and wanted to emulate the fighting spirit of Saint Joan.
"I always wanted to be a sister as far back as I can remember," she said.
When she moved to Syracuse, N.Y., for training as a Franciscan nun right after graduation, some of her family members doubted she’d last more than six weeks because they didn’t think a teenager so "full of life" could take the rigorous discipline, she said.
Souza took over as head of Saint Francis in 1991 when enrollment had sunk to 275 students in grades 7 through 12. She was told to turn things around or the school would not survive, and said she took on the challenge because "it was my alma mater. I didn’t want it to close down."
She brought the curriculum and faculty up to modern standards and soon opened an elementary school, she said.
"The big question was, Would they come? They came in droves. Maybe it’s true: Build it and they will come," she said. "I think we have an excellent curriculum — 99 percent of our students go on to college. We’re a college preparatory school."
Today Saint Francis has 496 students in kindergarten through 12th grade, a 12 percent increase from last year in a city where many private schools are struggling, she said.
This year’s senior class is the last all-girls class in the school’s 87 years, which will produce some nostalgia, she acknowledged. Souza ruffled a few feathers in the process of going coed in 2006 to increase enrollment and meet the needs of a changing community, but she has never been one to take the well-traveled road.
She doesn’t wear a nun’s habit; sometimes refers to God as "she"; and throws faculty tailgate parties to root for University of Hawaii sports, having a Heineken now and then. "I wasn’t born a nun. Anything in moderation is fine," she said.
Souza usually dresses in an aloha shirt, blazer and skirt instead of the traditional nun’s garb, which she said is a throwback to the Middle Ages, when women covered their heads and wore robes to ward off the cold in the drafty castles of Europe. It was never intended to be the uniform forever, she said.
Her modern clothing makes her more approachable to students, but so do her smiles, jokes and hugs, she said.
"I love to shake up the world" when she occasionally refers to God as a female, Souza said. "God is pure spirit. God is not a he; God is not a she. God couldn’t create us male and female if God didn’t have qualities of both."
Her philosophy is, "God doesn’t walk around with a baseball bat. He’s not up there waiting for us to make a mistake so he can punish you. God is forgiving. There is definitely right and wrong, but we choose heaven or hell by the way we live."
"Hell is a state of being; it’s not a time or place. It’s total isolation for all eternity, and you choose it if all you care about is me, myself and I. Heaven is a state of being in perfect joy because you’re with God," she said.
Adapting to change helps Souza strike a balance between her old-school standards of discipline and the overall loosening of boundaries in today’s society.
"Rules have to be clear and reasonable. I expect them to be followed, or you spend a lot of time on nonsense. When I tell you once, you’re going to do it," she said.
"When I was in high school, things were much stricter. Skirts had to be three inches below the knee; now it’s three inches above the knee. You would get into trouble if you were seen in the front seat of a car with a boy, but not today. Society has changed. The vast majority of kids are still good, and they want to be good, but kids today tend to lose their innocence much faster than children of the past," she said.
She allows the use of iPods only in the student center and library, but cellphones are banned during school hours.
"We used to spend our time looking things up in a card catalog in the library. Now they can Google. Many have laptops, which we allow them to use," she said. "That’s their world. We can’t take our world and put it on them; it’s not going to work. You’re not going to stop technology. You’re just not."
