by Joyce Marcel, Vermont Business Magazine, November 2007 During her long and distinguished career in public life, Sister Janice Elizabeth Ryan, RSM, has never had a game plan.

“The road always seemed to be opening up in front of me,” she says. “I never had time to plan it. It kept happening.”

Let’s look at some of the things that have happened to “happen:” she spearheaded the drive which created the first special education mainstreaming law in the country – in 1972! Her work made Vermont a model for the national and states’ laws that followed.

She went on to lobby successfully for enough changes in Vermont law – 13 separate pieces of legislation were either deleted, changed or added – to allow for group homes and other support systems in the community for the developmentally disabled – essentially doing away with warehousing.

For 17 years, Ryan was president of the now-shuttered Catholic women’s school Trinity College in Burlington. Among other things, she successfully carried through the college’s first capital campaign.

She left Trinity to spend seven years in Washington working first on a treaty to ban land mines, and then to eliminate the death penalty. Although her ultimate goals have yet to be achieved, her group was instrumental in creating incentives for states to use DNA testing; many innocent people have been freed from death row as a result.

And most recently, she spent three years as Vermont’s Deputy Commissioner of Corrections. Yes, that’s right. For three years, a nun helped run the state’s prison system.

Ryan’s CV fills eight pages. She’s won about 26 awards – most recently, the 2007 Dr Martin Luther King Community Service Award. She’s been a member of countless state and national professional organizations, and been the guest of many nations, including Sweden, El Salvador, Jordan, Croatia, Vietnam and Cambodia, Bolivia, Russia and Columbia.

Given her boundless energy, formidable intelligence, political savvy, iron determination and laser-sharp focus on making lives better for the poor and the disenfranchised, added to her humility, softness, humor, sense of irony and her taste for practical jokes (she once dedicated a new bathroom in her office at Trinity to a friend – ribbon cutting ceremony et al), Ryan, a farmer’s daughter from Fairfield, has managed to both defy as well as define a woman’s role – not to mention a religious person’s role – in society.

Many people tell stories about Ryan, but one about an attempted purse snatch seems to sum her up best. It was told to me by Joyce Engelken, who was the vice president for finance and administration at Trinity during Ryan’s tenure.

“It was after hours,” Engelken said. “But some of us were still at school. And some young man stole her purse. Janice chased him out of the building. The guy jumped on a bicycle and took off down Pearl Street. Janice commandeered a car in the parking lot and told the driver, ‘Quick! Quick! We’ve got to chase this guy.’ The driver said, ‘Sure,’ and she jumped in the car. They took off after this guy and caught him. And this is in designer clothes and high heels! Janice took him straight to the police station – this was the old Burlington police station – and filled out the reports. When she came back, she said, ‘I was appalled at the state of the police station. No one should have to work in those conditions. Something needs to be done.’ So, quietly, she started planting the seeds. And maybe she was instrumental in making people see that despite the budget problems, a new police station was important. And she ended up riding with the cops, because she wanted to see what was really going on. It was never dull working for her.”

Accounting executive and financial guru David Coates met Ryan in the early 1980s and served as one of her financial advisors while she was at Trinity. Together, the two created the Champlain Initiative, which since 1996 has been working to make life healthier and safer for the people of the Champlain Valley.

“I immediately liked her and her style,” Coates said. “There was no beating around the bush, no nonsense. She made it clear what she wanted and why it was important to whatever project she working on. Who can say no to a nun?”

Ryan was a good listener and a skilled leader, Coates said.

“She would always reach out to people she felt would have the knowledge and insight around a given issue,” he said. “It was important for her to fully understand the issue before she would make a decision. Once she was satisfied she had thoroughly processed all of the information, she would make her decision. She always took full responsibility and never, ever passed the proverbial buck. Her follow- through and communication skills are superb.”

Ryan was the first nun who ever served on a bank board of directors, at least in Vermont.

“She was a director of the Bank of Vermont – and a highly respected member, I might add,” Coates said. “I liked to call her the conscience of the board. She made sure we focused on the needs of the people we served. She had the respect of the entire board, and when she talked we all listened. But when it comes to sports, she doesn’t know beans.”

During her tenure as Deputy Commissioner of Corrections, Ryan butted heads on more than one occasion with Mike Smith, now Secretary of the Agency of Administration but then Secretary of Human Services. Smith calls Ryan “tough but fair” and says she’s “one of the hardest workers I’ve ever met.”

“Overall, she’s guided by compassion and dedicated to justice – not only for society, but in her role as deputy commissioner for the inmates,” Smith said. “I really admire her a lot in terms of what she did. And I can call her a friend. As a friend, we had some frank discussions on various issues. And if she didn’t agree with me, she would tell me. We were always able to come to some sort of conclusion that both of us could live with. Maybe I got too detail-oriented. Sometimes she felt I may have been micro-managing. Nine times out of 10, Sister Janice was right.”

Given the amount of fighting Ryan has had to do against the establishment, it makes sense that she enjoys a small plaque on a wall in her home that describes what would have happened if the Three Wise Men of Nativity fame had been the Three Wise Women: “They would have asked directions, arrived on time, helped deliver the baby, cleaned the stable, made a casserole, and brought practical gifts.”

In person, Ryan, now 71, is elegant, sophisticated and well-dressed. The long black nun’s habit has long been retired to the closet. She wore it after she was ordained in the order of the Sisters of Mercy in 1954, but gave it up in 1967, during Vatican II.

We met in the small, quiet, rented duplex in South Burlington which she shares with Sister Elizabeth Candon, another past president of Trinity. Their home is small, warm and comfortable. The furnishings – mostly donated over the years, Ryan says – include carpets on top of carpeting, crystal knickknacks, and a lot of art; a wall full of Sabra Fields’s works, given to Ryan over the years as tributes, is especially lovely.

Ryan speaks deliberately, carefully and uses old-school locution – “Lest I need,” “Many fewer” and “I’m on my knees in gratitude” are a few of the expressions she used during our first, two-hour conversation.

Ryan is extremely family oriented, and pictures of her nieces and nephews cover the refrigerator.

“She talks to them on the phone and goes to all their occasions,” Engelken said. “And she was so successful in Washington, but she really felt she needed to get back to Vermont, because her mother was getting older. Janice is a complex woman who never got far from the farm girl in Fairfield.”

The Farmer’s Daughter

Janice Elizabeth Ryan was born into a farming family in 1936 in Fairfield. She s the oldest of six children – the girls came first, then the boys – of Leo and Veronica Ryan.

“My mother is the ultimate of behaviorists,” Ryan said. “If we got the chores done in the house, then we had the privilege of going out to work with our father on the farm. Did we get paid? Oh heavens, no! It was a team effort.”

Ryan’s strong sense of social justice began at home.

“Certainly having a social conscience was a way of life in my own family,” Ryan said. “They always went to wakes and did supportive kinds of things when somebody’s barn burned or when there were special kinds of troubles. Reaching out and caring for one another is part of the life of a farm community. So are common celebrations, like the end of sugaring or the end of corn time. People took turns hosting a large party to celebrate that part of the season. I came to adulthood with a sense that these things are important. It’s what you do.”

None of her siblings entered the priesthood or joined a religious community, Ryan said, “But they all have a strong sense of social justice.”

Her parents also instilled in Ryan a sense that she could undertake any task with confidence.

“My mother and father, for as long as I can remember, and for all six of us, said, ‘Do whatever you want to do, but do it well,'” she said. “Though my father wasn’t dependent on us girls for getting the work done, never once do I ever remember being told, ‘You can’t do that because girls don’t do that.’ When we earned the privilege of going out to work, we drove the truck or the tractor or the hay bailer, and we milked the cows.”

Ryan’s first school was a one-room schoolhouse called the Creek School. It had about 14 students.

“It was a wonderful experience, but I was the only one in my grade,” she said. “That made it a little less thrilling, but I love reading as a direct result.”

Since Fairfield didn’t have a high school, where to send Ryan next was a quandary. There was a school in St Albans, 10 miles away, but getting there and back would be difficult.

“There’s not blacktop, and farmer’s don’t stop their milking to take their children to school,” Ryan said.

Her cousins had boarded with relatives in St Albans, but then her father met a farmer from Grand Isle who had five daughters at the former Mount St Mary’s Academy in Burlington.

“And that’s how I ended up at boarding school,” Ryan said. “It was full of girls who had really been together since kindergarten, and some borders from Canada and Latin America, and a few farmers’ daughters. I was the most lonesome kid you’ve ever saw in high school, going in. But between the strength of the curriculum, the great books, and the academy’s very large emphasis on social justice, it was an inspirational experience.”

Sisters Of Mercy

Ryan entered the order of the Sisters of Mercy in 1954.

“All I can tell you is that in April of my senior year of high school, I suddenly felt with my whole being that was what I was supposed to do,” Ryan said. “I was not overly excited about getting up at 5:30 am. It held no particular appeal, nor did wearing a long black dress and old ladies’ shoes. Little did I know that the shoes would be high fashion in 2007. There are a thousand answers to the question of why I became a nun. But it was the spirit of the Sisters of Mercy that drew me. It was a spirit that had a particular focus on education, particularly education for women, and a special commitment to the poor. I love the Sisters of Mercy and have no regrets.”

The order was founded in Dublin, Ireland, in 1831 and has been a presence in Burlington since the mid-1800s. Today it has about 9,000 members in the United States. It was founded with, and still maintains, a special focus on helping immigrants.

“We have a sister, to give you an example, in El Paso, Texas, who visits the jails where women have been detained to be sent back,” Ryan said. “We are also working with children of migrant workers.”

Sisters of Mercy run hospitals in many states, but in Vermont, the primary focus was always on teaching.

“It was colleges and elementary schools,” Ryan said. “They very often had a private academy, where the sisters worked for a salary as one way of supporting themselves, and then they also worked in parochial schools for a pittance. These were different ways of helping the poor while you still had to support yourselves. And that’s still true.”

The order is not supported financially by the Catholic Church in any formal way.

“I always earned a salary,” Ryan said. “In my last job as deputy commissioner of corrections, the check went into a direct deposit account of the Sisters of Mercy. Once a year, we submit a budget for what we think out needs are going to be in the following year. And then you get a check each month for whatever that amount turns out to be. We are very, very mindful of money. The sister on the border in Texas might earn $11,000 representing children of undocumented people, but she may need $30,000 to live. Someone else might earn $2,000, and they, too, need $30,000 to live. It’s a common fund, and you’re allocated what you think you need.”

The number of women in the United States who join religious orders is dwindling.

“I do not expect this trend to change,” Ryan said. “We face our diminution with honesty and hope. Hope because as Christians, we know that hope does not evade the inevitability of death. There will be a re-founding or revitalization of some of the traditional congregations. The Spirit will lead the way, and it is our job to be open to it.”

Until recently, Sister of Mercy communities in each state had their own governing boards, consisting of four nuns who usually served two, four-year terms. But last year the order reorganized. Maine, Rhode Island, Vermont, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Massachusetts joined together to make a New England chapter, with headquarters in Rhode Island.

“And there’re doing this all around the country, so there will be five of these regional groups,” Ryan said. “And over that, we have an institute with four elected people, and that’s just outside Washington. Then there are other countries that do this, and so we have a federation. And that’s more than you want to know.”

Ryan’s training took nine years. The first year she studied theology, the nature of vows and aspects of community life. She also began to take college courses at Trinity. The second year, called “the Canonical Year,” focused on prayer, meditation and theology – Ryan calls it “more of a cloister year.” During the third year she prepared for taking her first vows, and continued with her college courses.

At the same time, she was assigned a mentor, another sister who was an experienced teacher.

“She is the one who mentored and trained you in what I would now call the pedagogy of teaching,” Ryan said. “In 1956, I started teaching, under my mentor.”

Ryan’s first teaching assignment was at the now-defunct, co-educational Cathedral Grammar School in Burlington. It had 900 students. She started teaching fourth grade – where one of her students was Vermont’s current Attorney General, William Sorrell – and then taught junior high. She taught there from 1956 to 1965.

“I absolutely loved teaching,” Ryan said. “I loved that particular school, Cathedral. I loved everything about it. I was very happy teaching.”

A Different Direction

Ryan completed her BA in English from Trinity in 1965. Then an unexpected assignment sent her off in a new direction.

“In those days one got assignments – and mine was to take over the religion program in this area for children and youth who were mentally retarded,” Ryan said. “This was a program I would do on the side, after school. I was asked to spend a summer learning how to do that at Cardinal Stritch College in Milwaukee. The sisters ran a large residential program there. When I got there, I found out it was a master’s program in special education – not a program to give you the skills for religious education. The two are related, but they certainly have a different emphasis. It’s a dress, but it’s not the size you were looking for. My choice was to stay or go home. And I stayed.”

When Ryan came back to Burlington, she continued teaching at Cathedral, but she also took over the religious program for retarded students. There were over 60 children and youth in the program, all with some form of delayed development.

Her life became focused on helping this population.

“I used college students as teachers and trained them, and then they wanted a course in mental retardation,” Ryan said. “These were bio majors, psychology majors, and social workers in the making. They wanted to know how does mental retardation happen? Why?”

There were no courses on the subject in Vermont. Ryan called the Vermont Department of Education to learn how she could set one up.

“And that’s how I got started in special ed,” she said. “It brought me to Trinity. It was about meeting a set of circumstances. This road just kept opening itself.”

Changing The Laws

Ryan soon added a second course on mental retardation at Trinity. Then she got a federal grant to go to Boston University to take advanced degree in special education. She got her MA in 1967.

When she returned to Trinity, she stopped teaching entirely and focused on developing a curriculum in special education. She also trained teachers. At Trinity between 1967 and 1974, Ryan was the chairperson of the Division of Special Education and the director of the Trinity College Educational Media Center. She also set up a diagnostic center where her trainees could monitor students’ behavior. The she also became the director of the Diagnostic and Pre-School Program for Handicapped Children.

Her work raised her consciousness about how these children were treated.

“I never knew that all children were not welcome in public school,” Ryan said. “I didn’t know that. I learned it by working with parents, and then with finding out that the schools – particularly for children with moderate and sever mental retardation – were rooms in the old fire station or in the old school or whatever. That didn’t make any sense to me, or to some other people.”

This spurred Ryan into action. She started lobbying for a law to mainstream special needs kids into the public schools. Soon she had attracted a team of people with similar goals. And together they pulled out all the stops.

“We all did this after our day jobs,” Ryan said. “There was no one in Montpelier who wanted such a law. Not Governor Davis, not the Department of Education, not the chairmen of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, not the House and Senate education committees – no one wanted a special education law.”

So the group began grassroots organizing.

“We left Montpelier and went to designated counties and met with groups of parents during the worst ice we’ve ever had,” Ryan said. “We did basic eighth grade civics – how to talk to your legislators, particularly if they were on the right committee. We went to seven counties and met with parents and other advocates of children and youth who were not welcome or who were ineligible to attend public school. It was a tremendous team effort.”

These parent-advocate groups became one of Vermont’s most powerful grassroots lobbying groups. And things started to happen.

“Bills were introduced in the Vermont Legislature to provide a free and appropriate public education to children and youth with handicaps,” Ryan said. “One of these bills – Senate Bill 98 – passed into law in 1972.”

During this period, Trinity was closing every January to save money on energy. Ryan used her vacation time to live and work as an aide at the now-defunct Brandon Training School, which was serving a resident population of about 900 mentally retarded children, youths and adults.

“I went down and took a couple of students with me,” Ryan said. “I lived as an aide and worked in the unit because of the teacher education. I wanted to know what was going to happen to these children – where were they going to go? Because that would have some influence over the curriculum we were designing. While working there, I saw that there were persons who didn’t need to be there. They were there because of circumstances. They had limitations, but they were not that severe. They were there for whatever reason, the family network, a hundred different stories.”

Ryan saw that another set of laws was needed.

Executive Director

Vermont needed laws to allow mentally challenged adults to live in their own communities.

“To accomplish this, I took a leave from the Trinity faculty in 1974 to accept the position of Director of the Champlain and Vermont Association for Retarded Persons,” Ryan said. “Their goals and mine were the same – to enable children and youth with mental retardation to live in their community as normally as possible.

In this capacity, from 1974-1979, Ryan joined forces with an attorney for Legal Aid and a roster of parents, friends and some supportive legislators.

“We advocated successfully to either delete, add or modify certain laws,” Ryan said. “We worked on a zoning law, for example, so you could have five or six unrelated people live in a house if they had cerebral palsy or mental retardation or epilepsy. I never saw Brandon as closing, because it was a good place with a great staff, but I saw Brandon as relocating the persons there to be closer to either their homes or to services. Because Brandon was located on many acres, but you couldn’t walk to work, and no buses came there.”

The net result was to make placement in local communities easier and safer for people with developmental disabilities.

Joan Sylvester, who retired as executive director of the Champlain and Vermont Association for Retarded Citizens in 1994, and who worked with Ryan throughout this era, credits her with making the lives of handicapped people much easier and more rewarding.

“What we have today in terms of mainstreaming handicapped students is a direct result of our early efforts in education,” Sylvester said. “I would say Vermont has always been on the forefront on public policy and laws for people with disabilities, and it’s because of people like Janice who make it happen. She is a wonderful, delightful, awesome woman, and a lot of fun to be with. But she’s focused, determined and tenacious. When she focuses on something, it happens. We passed many laws. Janice certainly helped so many people in Vermont because of her passion for social justice.”

Trinity College

In 1979, Ryan’s life changed again. This time the agent of change was a phone call.

“I think, left to myself, I would have continued in public policy,” Ryan said. “But I got a telephone call, one fine day in May of 1979. The president of Trinity had left. It’s difficult to advertise, search and find a president between May and September. The call I got was from a Sister of Mercy on the board at Trinity who asked me, on behalf of the board, to come back as acting interim president until they could find one. Because a Sister of Mercy asked me, I was going to do it. But it was very hard, because I really liked policy.”

Trinity College was founded as an undergraduate school for Catholic women by the Sisters of Mercy in 1925, the same year as Bennington College.

“Trinity opened immediately,” Ryan said. “The boys in Bennington couldn’t get it together to open until 1930. The sisters paid all their bills during the Depression – I don’t know how they did it. I just love Trinity; you have to know that. I’m hopelessly biased.”

Ryan spent the next 17 years as Trinity’s president. By the time she took over, Trinity had already opened its classrooms to adults in need of college degrees, and to men. Ryan’s first task was opening a weekend college.

“All the work had been done, but I opened it,” Ryan said. “We had five majors you could only get on weekends. We placed one ad in the Burlington Free Press; 400 responses. It was great, having the older and younger students together. I loved the students. I really, really did. And I was active with higher education in the state and nationally.”

According to Engelken, the finance and administration VP who came to Trinity shortly after Ryan took over, Ryan had a strong commitment to the idea of education for everyone.

“She made sure our adult students received the same quality of education that our normal students did,” Engelken said. “This was not particularly the norm. She was demanding as a president, but also really appreciative.”

In her new job, Ryan developed a talent for fundraising.

“The Sisters of Mercy hadn’t gotten into asking people for money,” Engelken said. “They may have asked people for stamps for envelopes, but Janice hired a staff person for fundraising and got into it. Under her, we had our first capital campaign, and it was successful. She became very aware of what her role could be nationally. And she was able to participate in some discussions in Washington on financial aid, for instance, which was crucial at that time. She moved as easily among Congressmen as she did among farmers in Fairfield.”

Soon Ryan’s staff was calling her “The Flying Nun.”

“She was very busy fundraising, getting Trinity’s name known out of Burlington, and raising other issues,” Engelken said. “She was flying back and forth to Washington and to national conferences. She was one of the most politically savvy people I’ve ever met. She could be so tired she could barely walk, and someone would call and ask her to come to Montpelier, and she would be all energy and running down there to confer on legislation. She was the first woman to go to the Ethan Allen Club. The place almost fell over. She saw that as important for women. And she was a marvelous mentor. We have at least two college presidents now who worked under her at Trinity. From a small school, that’s very unusual.”

Another of Ryan’s innovations was hiring a public relations firm.

“They needed to promote themselves to get new admissions,” said Yoram Samets of the advertising agency Kelliher, Samets and Volk. His firm spent five years working with Ryan to develop catalogs, ads, and strategic ways of positioning the school in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

“Trinity was a powerful institution in the state of Vermont,” Samets said. “It benefited women who, at that time, had very limited choices. Trinity worked diligently under Sister Janice’s leadership to meet the needs of Vermonters who were considering going to college for the first time. Our job, with Sister Janice’s leadership, was to help in making sure they had enough students to keep the whole thing moving forward. New programs were added, new degrees were added, and all of it in a challenging time frame.”

Samets admires Ryan for her ability to marry spirituality to the bottom line.

“Sister Janice is a very unusual person in the way she has the ability to integrate both the human side of business and the business part of business,” Samets said. “In the business world it’s rare to have that. She has had a very profound effect on me. She has an intuitive sense of how to reach inside someone and communicate to them, support them and partner with them. She’s a very impressive human being. When I, personally, have the privilege of spending time with someone who lives in and thinks about God, it has a pretty profound impact on your day to day.”

Washington

By 1996, Ryan felt it was time to move on from Trinity.

“I think 15 years would have been just about the right time, but I stayed two extra years because we were finishing a capital campaign,” Ryan said. “I didn’t leave because I was burnt out. I left because it was time to turn the leadership over. So I took an appointment as a visiting professor, but I actually wanted to be on sabbatical. I wanted to do public service for three months in Washington. So I contacted Senator Leahy’s office, and that public service turned into the next seven years – in a very different way, which I had never expected.”

Ryan moved to DC to work on banning land mines. She became the project director for the Catholic Campaign to Ban Land mines from 1997 to 1999. But the project never really had a chance.

“It was the Newt Gingrich days, and the Trent Lott days,” Ryan said.

While Ryan was in DC, Trinity College closed because of financial restraints. By that time, it had educated over 5,000 students. It was a painful time for people who were close to the school.

“I have to tell you, the first time I came back to Vermont, I wondered how I would feel when I drove down that street,” Ryan said. “I was kind of prepared. And as I approached the end of that avenue, I looked at the house where we had all lived, and had lots of good times, and I was overwhelmed by thinking of how great it had been. And then I looked at the building where my office had been, and I was filled with gratitude. We had 75 great years, and I was there for 27 of them, and I wouldn’t have traded a minute, and I just feel very good at what we did. The legacy lives on in lots of its graduates, and everything has its time, and its time had come.”

In 1999, Ryan moved over to Senator Jeffords’ office and became his education director.

“Jeffords was chairman of the Senate Health Education Labor and Pension committee,” said Sherry Kaiman, who worked for Jeffords, and is now the policy director for Trust for America’s Health. “In that capacity, Janice basically organized all of Jeffords’ education initiatives for him. She was the eyes and ears of what was going on on the ground for Jeffords in education – higher, secondary and preschool.”

Among other things, Jeffords was interested in making sure that people who were incarcerated had the ability to be educated.

“He wanted a very, very big thing,” Kaiman said. “He wanted to make sure that people were prepared for the day when they were released. And Janice was very, very committed to this throughout her career. She always very much cared for those who did not have a voice. Those are the individuals she has fought for her entire life. I have always said Vermont was a leader in special ed long before the rest of the country. Janice was a one-woman brigade.”

Meanwhile, former marine and peace activist Robert “Bobby” Muller, who had funded Ryan’s land mine position through his organization, the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, asked Ryan to help with criminal justice reform.

So, from 2001 to 2003, Ryan served as director of Justice Education and Interfaith Relations under The Justice Project. This was a team working to eliminate the death penalty.

“And I’m not talking about standing outside and holding candles,” Ryan said. “Did we eliminate the death penalty? Well, 67 percent of the people wanted it, and we got it down to 55 percent. But what we did get was DNA.”

Focusing on DNA testing was a subtle bit of policy work that, in the end, managed to save lives.

“What we worked on was to pass a federal law to give more incentive to states to mandate testing,” Ryan said. “So, as in Vermont, it’s mandated to give a sample. Nationally, that has led to a number of exonerated people, simply because of DNA did not match. Tactically, you have to do something like this in phases. And then there was the whole Governor Ryan thing in Chicago – when he threw out the death penalty. Now doctors aren’t allowed to give the lethal injection. So you have a whole swirl of things that might ultimately lead to that end. I don’t know if I’ll see it in my lifetime.”

In 2003, Ryan was laying off people in the project – including herself.

“I was going to come back to Vermont, and I thought I’d take the summer off,” Ryan said. “And then I got a call from then-Commissioner of Corrections Steve Gold, asking me be his deputy. It seemed to be a perfect fit. It entailed working in policy. In corrections, when certain policies are made, they have to be turned into a directive, and then it goes back for approval to the Legislature, and so somebody has to do a lot of knitting and a lot of caring and a lot of praying. And so that was my primary responsibility.”

Back In Vermont

Ryan was the first women ever to hold the job of Deputy Commissioner of Corrections. Her first three months on the job were peaceful, she said.

“I thought I had died and gone to heaven,” Ryan said. “I inherited a desk that no one had sat at for two years, so it wasn’t like a pile of stuff was on my desk. I didn’t have a heavy briefcase, and I was leaving work at 5 o’clock. I just couldn’t get over it.”

Then all hell broke loose. Seven prisoners died in one year. Some of the deaths were natural, but three were suicides.

“The third suicide happened in October 2003,” Ryan said. “Simultaneously, the man in corrections who had all the responsibility for all the prisons – for people out of state, for parole, for community justice centers, all the other operations – hit retirement age. He’d been there 30 years. The suicides and his retirement were unrelated, but they happened at the same time. And we also had our positions frozen. That meant that when somebody retired, the position was left unfilled. Who’s going to do the work? It came onto my desk.”

The suicides were front page news for weeks.

“The publicity ranged from the public wanting to know why this had happened – which they certainly had a right to know, to the corrections culture, which was a pretty closed culture,” Ryan said. “Steve Gold wanted – and I certainly supported this – an outside investigation. So that’s how I ended up in Governor Douglas’s office with the commissioner.”

Ryan was surprised at how well Douglas handled the situation.

“I’ve seen other governors up close and personal, and what I expected was not what I saw,” Ryan said. “I expected ‘Get this off the front page now!’ and ‘Whose head is going to roll? Take care of it and take care of it now!’ I found he had very insightful questions and was very supportive.”

Douglas ordered an outside investigation.

“He certainly cared, in terms of people’s lives, about the victims, the workers and so forth,” Ryan said. “He was very reasoned and very cool. And when you’re in that set of circumstances, you need cool heads.”

The state formed a legislative corrections oversight committee, and gave Ryan and Gold the staff they needed to cope with the crisis – they were able to hire a physician-psychiatrist to oversee the prisons, for example.

“The committee had hard questions, but their questions were without acrimony,” Ryan said. “It helps people understand what is going on. Why do we have 500 men out of state? What would it take not to have that? What would it cost? What law might be changed to reduce the number of people coming in? Should marijuana be legalized? And on and on.”

Ryan left the Department of Corrections in 2006.

“But I will never be able to leave corrections,” she said. “It grabs me. Just like I would never leave education. To do this position was a privilege. Hands down. I am grateful for Steve ever inviting me. I am grateful to Governor Douglas for approving the appointment. I loved the people in corrections. Corrections is awesome. There’s so much to think about, to weigh, to balance. I stayed there three years.”

Ryan said she was proud of the way Vermont handles its prisoners.

“Rehabilitation sits at the heart of the state’s philosophy,” Ryan said. “Truly, it’s that everyone can change. Does everyone change? No. But the belief that everyone can change is there, and it’s a wonderful kind of culture to move into. We have some good programs in our prisons – one for rehabilitation is particularly focused on enabling you to think about changing your thought patterns. There’s a very good program for sex offenders. And we have a great education program – we have an accredited high school program inside the prisons, and the same high school in areas where probation and parole officers are. But by no means do we have enough. We truly don’t.”

The Future

Growing up as she did in a period where women had few options – marriage, nursing or teaching were about the end of it – and coming from a rural farming environment, Ryan has witnessed big changes in gender roles.

But from her parents’ admonition to “do whatever you want to do, but do it well,” to her lifelong experience in community living, she has never felt that personally, gender was an issue.

“In the academy, I saw Sisters of Mercy teaching,” Ryan said. “But because I lived in residence, if a light bulb needed changing, or something needed cleaning, or whatever, they were also doing it. I didn’t think of it very much, but there wasn’t a retinue of men around doing those things. Then I entered the convent. We ran the machines – we’re talking about the big machines we used at that time. We didn’t drive the big bus, but we raised the money to buy the bus through Green Stamps. So I have the mindset, what is it that needs to be done and who has the skills to do it and match them up? Which gives me a very high level of expectation.”

When she ran Trinity, Ryan said, she expected people “to measure up.”

“If you’re in the classroom or teaching, I expect you to use your full voice,” Ryan said. “And I expect to see your eyes. And if you’re supposed to be standing up, I expect you to stand up and put your shoulders back and speak out. It was very much part of the special education program I was responsible for. I was a big behaviorist at that time. I would take students to the national convention, and part of their assignment was to meet the author of the textbook, shake hands, have at least two sentences of conversation and be observed by another student. I wanted these future teachers to have confidence in their professional life – not just in the classroom when the door was shut.”

If, for example, one of her trainee’s students needed speech therapy, Ryan wanted her to have the confidence to advocate with the school administration for that student.

“And because I dealt primarily with women for so long, and because now I’ve had lots of experience in other organizations, I don’t have a lot of patience with nonsense,” Ryan said.

That doesn’t mean that confidence comes easily or automatically, not even for Ryan. She remembers a time at Trinity, in 1968, when she hosted a social gathering for a special education conference. She was supposed to welcome the 200 guests, but her confidence failed her.

“I just turned back around and walked into an empty room,” Ryan said. “I didn’t know how I was going to do this. But it must be the farming in me. I just marched myself back in and did it. You don’t get to do that naturally without some practice. There are inherently – and I can’t explain it – some gender differences. Some men – even some little boys – would find that easier. But OK, that’s the way it is, we still have to get the same results.”

Do women today have equal opportunity with men? In Ryan’s view, that won’t happen until men have babies.

“I think the inequality is reflected in wages,” she said. “If men had babies, it would probably be easier to figure out strategies for how their children could have equality at work. Yes, we have women in most of the professions now, but looking at the top, we still don’t see as many women as we thought would be there.”

Ryan foresees a future, however, where a different set of gender traits – those usually associated with women – might have greater economic value.

“The industrial model that we’ve had right up through the 20th century is having to change in the 21st Century,” Ryan said. “The commando model, where you do what you’re told to do on the day you’re told to do it and at the time you’re told to do it and the way you’re told to do it and the number of times you’re told to do it – that paradigm is shifting.”

The workplace today needs flexibility, and retaining workers can be a very big problem.

“What you will see, if you look at the national agendas of national organizations, is the question of how to nurture your employees,” Ryan said. “I had to laugh at a story I read about Fletcher Allen, where 75 nurses have taken special courses in geriatrics. Instead of the curing, it’s the caring. In the workplace, there’s going to be much more caring of employees. There’s going to be an emphasis on creativity and teamwork. What effect this will have on advancing women’s careers? We’ll have to wait and see.”

Most people hope they do something in their lifetime that leaves the world a better place. Ryan has devoted her life to that ideal.

“Have I made the world a better place?” she said. “I don’t think about it that way. I have no idea. What I know is I’ve done the best I could do on that day, and hope to God I did no harm. There are so many things you see after you’ve finished it. For example, there’s a big difference in the pedagogical skills I started out with and what I know now. But you use the best of what you had when you were there. Is there anything I’ve ever been responsible for that I would do differently? My answer would be yes, without a question, and I hope so. You keep getting layers of how you might have done it as you get a greater in-depth understanding of human behavior and then, ultimately, of organizational development. But the core thing is trust in relationships. And in teamwork.”

Ryan’s sabbatical ends in March, and yet she says she still has no idea about what will come next. She knows, however, that she’ll know the answer when it comes.

“Surely now, you understand when I said earlier, this was not a planned life,” Ryan said. “It just kept opening up.”

Joyce Marcel is a freelance writer and author from Dummerston. Her new book, a collection of her columns called, “A Thousand Words or Less,” is now available. Learn more about her and how to order the book at her Web site: www.joycemarcel.com.