Elementary school teachers have the first and the longest opportunity to reach children. "Give me the child of today and I ask not for the rest of the world," someone once said, "for today's child will be the rest of the world tomorrow."
Leroy Jones, world renowned jazz trumpet player, to this day credits Sister Mary Hilary Simpson with recognizing his talent at age ten, while he was in elementary school at St. Leo's.
"His first influence was a nun, a trumpet-playing nun.
'It was Sister Hilary, at St. Leo the Great Elementary School,' Leroy Jones explains. From her, he learned the rudiments of his craft. 'I took music lessons. Not jazz, music,' he emphasizes. "Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, a fellow St. Leo the Great graduate once wrote of Leroy Jones, 'Every year, Leroy would be the first trumpet . . . we all looked up to him.' Marsalis was the junior by four grades.
"Leroy Jones recalls the tenacious swing of Armstrong . . ."
From Gambit Weekly, April 4, 2003.
Sister Hilary, an accomplished trumpet player herself, has introduced thousands of children to musical instruments while overseeing the band programs, hands-on, in Catholic schools of the New Orleans area, and through south Louisiana since 1967.
Dynamic, ever-engaging Bishop 
Robert Muench of Baton Rouge Diocese has often said that he would not be a priest today but for his principal at St. Leo the Great, New Orleans, Sister Mary Alice Russell, who encouraged him as a young teenager to go to the seminary. The Bishop as he had promised her, preached at her funeral in July 2003. See our memorials section for her story.
Judge Gerard Hansen of New Orleans co-chaired an all-school reunion at St. Matthias School with now U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu when the school had closed in 1979. They expected perhaps two hundred alumni for this first reunion; two thousand came. 
Senator Landrieu acknowledges that it was from this experience that she was encouraged, fresh out of college, to run for the state legislature, and thus was launched into a life of public service. Now she is the twenty-sixth woman in U. S. history to serve in the Senate, the first from Louisiana.
Mary was the first of nine Landrieu children who attended St. Matthias, where their mother and all her siblings also graduated. Her brother Mitch is now lieutenant governor of Louisiana. Their youngest brother, Maurice, is a prosecuting attorney in the DA's office, known for his skills in communicating with racial minorities. Another sister, Madeleine, is an outstanding young judge in New Orleans.
The grade school reunions continue to draw astounding crowds. "Old" grads come from both coasts and foreign countries. To be there is to experience a powerful and dynamic spirit that binds the once-children of the Dominican Sisters of St. Mary.
