Comment on this story Seven Days Wednesday, Sept. 29 • The News Sentinel tells us that Beaumont Elementary, one of Knoxville’s so-called magnet programs to promote higher academic achievement, has finally been removed from the state’s list of under-performing schools. Great. Only in Knox County does “higher-achieving” mean “doesn’t suck anymore.” Thursday, Sept. 30 • All nine Tennessee members of the House of Representatives—including five Democrats—vote in favor of a proposed U.S. Constitutional amendment banning gay unions. The insomniacs among us already knew how the reps would vote. After all, we’ve had plenty of practice counting sheep. Friday, Oct. 1 • A politician—Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, no less—announces that he is returning contributions from a company (King Pharmaceuticals Inc.) he believes may have been trying to peddle influence. In other news: Pigs fly; the sky turns pink; bears don’t shit in the woods; the parkas are out in Hell. Saturday, Oct. 2 • The Auburn War Eagle plays the Tennessee Volunteers in college football at Neyland Stadium. Biologists the world over are astounded when the wrong species lays an egg. Sunday, Oct. 3 • Fentress County is hosting its annual Great Pumpkin Festival and Weigh-off contest. Witnesses swear that one of the entrants is actually Vol Coach Phillip Fulmer, in hiding after the Auburn loss. Monday, Oct. 4 • An audit by the Department of Energy finds that federal contractors in Oak Ridge reimbursed some employees for tuition costs at unaccredited “diploma mills” offering degrees-for-fees. Ordinarily, we’d cast aspersions, but we’d rather not invite any speculation concerning our J-school diplomas—the ones printed on the same paper stock as Spin magazine. Tuesday, Oct. 5 • Months after local officials told them that new capital funds would not be forthcoming, Knox County school board members say they’d love to see a portion of the politically endangered wheel tax earmarked for a new high school. That slow, crunching noise you hear, accompanied by much gagging and spitting, is the sound of County Mayor Mike Ragsdale, eating his words. Knoxville Found What is this? Every week in “Knoxville Found,” we’ll print the photo of a local curiosity. If you’re the first person to correctly identify this oddity, you’ll win a special prize plucked from the desk of the editor (keep in mind that the editor hasn’t cleaned his desk in five years). E-mail your guesses, or send ’em to “Knoxville Found” c/o Metro Pulse, 505 Market St., Suite 300, Knoxville, TN 37902. Last Week’s Photo: The portion of the sign pictured is located on Hill Avenue in front of Lord Lindsey mansion, home to a dance party that wakes up the neighbors every Thursday and Saturday night. Trust us. Congratulations to Saundra Dishman for recognizing the sign. We’ve got a promotional Shark Tale headband, complete with fin, for your amusement. Meet Your City A calendar of upcoming public meetings you should attend CITY COUNCIL Thursday, Oct. 7 5 p.m. City County Building Large Assembly Room 400 Main St. Workshop on employee healthcare issues. JAMES WHITE PARKWAY/CHAPMAN HIGHWAY CORRIDOR TASK FORCE Monday, Oct. 11 5 p.m. South Doyle Middle School Library 3900 Decatur Rd. CITY COUNCIL Tuesday, Oct. 12 7 p.m. City County Building Large Assembly Room 400 Main St. Regular meeting.

Suffering (and) the Children
Support group asks victims of Catholic priests to come forward

The pain in the room is almost palpable when the victim’s mother tells of her son’s abuse by the parish priest. It was 20 years ago, but she just learned of it this year when her son became suicidally depressed and finally told her what had happened.

“I had led my son by the hand to the priest’s house,” she says tearfully, “[The priest] had been in therapy for his pedophilia. If the church had told us about his crimes, my son would never have been abused.”

A college instructor and former Catholic Sunday School Teacher, the Lenoir City woman’s voice shakes when she describes her anger, her disgust, and her son’s ordeal. “The Catholic Priest was the last person I’d suspect to do something like that.”

If it sounds like an echo of hundreds of accusations against Roman Catholic priests across the country, that’s because the scandal broadens almost daily.

The Knoxville area and its archdiocese is no exception. Its former bishop, Anthony O’Connell, admitted a “relationship” with a young man before he was assigned here, and he’s been moved to Florida. A former principal from 1982 to ’85 of Knoxville Catholic High School, Frank Richards left the priesthood six years ago on the same day a fellow priest, later convicted of sex crimes against a young man, quit under a cloud of suspicion in Nashville. That conviction, of Edward J. McKeown, former priest of St. Thomas The Apostle in Lenoir City, came for a crime committed against a young man after he was no longer a priest. He’s serving 25-year sentence for rape and sodomy. He and Richards, who went to Florida and opened a restaurant, admitted to Nashville Police that they had sodomized dozens of boys at a farm Richards’ family owned nearby. Another former St. Thomas The Apostle priest, Steve LePrad, was put on leave and sent out of state by the Knoxville Diocese after a boy accused him of molestation in Knoxville’s Downtown YMCA in 2002.

McKeown was the teacher’s son’s abuser, she says. “He had sleepovers at his rectory in Harriman [where he was a mission priest when he was in Lenoir City] for 10- to 12-year-old boys. There was always one too few beds, so he would pick one boy to sleep with him. My son,” she says, “was just 12...”

The anger in the room is also nearly palpable when Susan Vance, a former nun, discusses those cases and others she’s followed across Tennessee. Still a practicing Catholic, she helped organize a Knoxville support group of the organization SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) and is a driving force behind the Oct. 8 - 15 Breaking the Silence Week, a series of forums in Memphis, Nashville, Chattanooga and Knoxville. The forums here will be at Pellissippi State’s Goins Auditorium at noon and 7 p.m. Oct. 12, and at the Shiloh Room of UT’s University Center at 10:30 a.m. and 6 p.m. Oct. 13.

Vance says the group encourages victims of priest abuse to come forward and begin to deal with their experiences and the emotional aftermath, but it also involves other people in the quest to get the church to own up to its responsibilities for some of its priests’ criminal behaviors and its failure to disclose the crimes.

“So much has been left to victims and their families. It’s time for other people to get involved. It takes so much energy, and those who were victimized don’t have that energy left,” Vance says.

Her church, she says, “cares about two things: image and assets,” and that attitude keeps the church hierarchy from active involvement in investigating its priests’ transgressions.

Fr. Vann Johnston, a canon lawyer and chancellor for the Knoxville Diocese, says of the Breaking the Silence Week sessions, “Our position is that everybody has the right to meet and to speak out. We support that right and hope that right is exercised responsibly.”

Johnston says the diocesan newsletter has invited people who’ve been victims or have knowledge of abuse to come forward. “In terms of priests related to the Knoxville Diocese,” he says, no accusations have surfaced as a result of those invitations.

Of the continuing protest on the part of some people that former Bishop McConnell’s photo still hangs in the halls of Knoxville Catholic High, despite his admissions, Johnston says, “It’s in a context that’s clearly historical in nature—not in a context that honors him.”

—Barry Henderson

‘A Room of Their Own’
City, county moveto end homelessness

As head of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, Philip Mangano travels around the country, talking with homeless people at shelters and soup kitchens.

“They never ask for a pill or a program or a protocol,” Mangano says of the disenfranchised. “They always ask for a place to live. That is what will induce them to come in—privacy, a room of their own.”

Mangano was in town Wednesday as Knox County and Knoxville announced their “10-year plan to end homelessness,” part of a national movement to take a new approach to ending chronic homelessness.

Homelessness is on the rise in Knoxville. Roger Nooe, a professor of social work at UT, oversees the Knoxville Coalition for the Homeless study of the county’s homeless populations every other year. The results of this year’s study were released Oct. 6.

“The numbers are clearly up. Probably close to 1,900 individuals are homeless,” he says. “We’re not getting people off the streets as quickly as they’re coming on. You see people placed, and those placements fall through. It probably takes three efforts and long-term support to get people stabilized.”

Nooe says the homeless population is spreading out, with more camps being found in rural and suburban areas of the county. There are also a lot of people living in large groups at cheap motels, an arrangement that makes them essentially homeless. Nooe also speculates that Knoxville is still coping with the loss of the Volunteers of America shelter for families two years ago.

“I think you’ve probably got more people living in cars or doubling up with relatives in a very tentative living arrangement,” he says.

Cities around the country have been adopting 10-year plans to tackle the problem. Each is specific to its community, but there are some similar components.

The city and county are forming a committee—which will be headed by Nooe and Kevin DuBose, from the city’s planning office—to look at what’s worked in other communities, what’s needed and available here. They’ll formulate a plan by early next year.

One component is likely to be “housing first,” where a concerted effort is made to get all chronic homeless people into secure housing, which then will give agencies more power to help their clients address mental health, substance abuse and job skills problems.

“The first effort is to get them into housing,” says Ginny Weatherstone, executive director of Volunteer Ministry Center. “We retain the emergency shelters to be truly that. But get as many people into housing as possible and then support them.... Make sure they’re maintaining, getting medication, providing services in the housing.”

Of course, doing that is not so simple. Weatherstone says a lot of the housing needs might be met with Section 8 vouchers. But there are restrictions on who can use public housing or housing vouchers; people with recent records or those who have been evicted from KCDC because of drug possession or a violent offense are ineligible. The Bush administration has also recently proposed cuts to the Section 8 program (Mangano says Congress has restored the funding).

Different types of housing are needed to meet special needs, Nooe says. One example is places that provide independent living with supervision to address mental illness and substance abuse. There’s a great demand for well-managed boarding houses, transitional housing and single-occupancy housing. “The private sector is not as well represented in terms of providing low-income housing,” Nooe says.

In some cases, money might be diverted from other areas. For instance, a lot of the mentally ill and alcoholics end up in jail. They’d be better served if there were alternatives to that, which would in turn save the county and city money in the jailing and police costs.

Another part of the effort is linking all of the provider agencies together electronically, through a system called “Homeless Management Information System,” or HMIS, which is being activated this month in Knox County. “What this would allow a case manager to do is better identify who else is involved with this client, where there may be resources and providing a comprehensive, coordinated effort, rather than a disjointed effort,” Nooe says.

Weatherstone hopes the committee will look at more inventive ways to tackle the problem. “One of the things I hope this will do is to come up with some creative things we’re not doing. And really look at things agencies are doing that are really enabling homelessness,” she says.

Of course, a lot of this depends on getting funding and support from the federal government. Mangano says they can count on increased support. He says that historically, funding has increased, so there’s no reason to expect cuts in services, despite the large federal deficit and recent tax cuts. He says President Bush has increased funding to programs that address chronic homelessness. And the federal government is doing a better job at preventing those at risk, mainly those paroled, people leaving foster care systems, and veterans. The government has also learned the lessons from when it deinstitutionalized the mental health system and put many people out on the streets without supervision.

“This is an unprecedented call to end any profile of homelessness. The way you end chronic homelessness is you have to provide housing for the folks,” Mangano says. “What we’ve learned is you have to add supportive housing.”

“The sense around the country and in Washington is there’s a new sense of hope because of the new research, new technologies, and new commitment,” he adds. “The old demoralized sense of inexhaustible, intractable homelessness has yielded to initiatives that can be addressed.”

—Joe Tarr

October 7, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 41 © 2004 Metro Pulse