Four habits. One faith.
Mass, retreats, student led ministry, and service. Open any of the four for how it actually runs.
Mass and the Sacraments
School wide Mass in the Raider Gym every week, and the Chapel of St. Joseph open for more.
Every week ›Retreats
Every grade, every year, from a day on the faith to an overnight for seniors and a day at the Abbey.
Every grade ›Campus Ministry Teams
Campus Ministers and Fratres. Students planning the events, leading the retreats, and feeding the brotherhood.
Student led ›The Service Program
130 hours before graduation, each grade aimed at a different need, all of it logged and verified.
Who it serves ›
A year of it. Every grade, every season.
Six fixtures hold the calendar together, and that is before the weekly Mass, the monthly ministry nights, and whatever Lent adds.
Retreats
Every grade steps out of class once a year, and the question gets bigger as he does. It runs from a first day on how the faith is lived here, through authentic masculinity and the longings of the heart, to a day with the monks at Saint Joseph Abbey and a senior overnight.
Every grade, every yearThe Senior Ring Mass
Rings blessed at the altar and handed to the class that earned them. The one Mass a senior brings his family to.
Campus Ministry Nights
Monthly evenings of prayer and fellowship, planned and run by the students themselves.
March for Life
Raiders travel to Washington DC to march, alongside schools from around the country.
Living Stations
The Passion, staged by students for the whole school during Lent. Nobody forgets his first one.
The Blood Drive
The drive nobody makes you sign up for, and the line runs down the hall anyway.
March for Life
Raiders marched with the Archdiocese of New Orleans as a prayerful and public witness to the dignity of every human life. Purple hats, a long cold walk, and the Capitol at night.
Living Stations of the Cross
The Campus Ministry teams of Rummel and Chapelle stage the Passion live, station by station, for the whole school. Nobody forgets his first one.
130 hours. None of them vague.
Every grade owes a different number of hours to a different corner of the community, so by graduation a Raider has served five kinds of neighbor, not one.
Food insecurity, half of it, with partners like Second Harvest.
The environment, or the care of animals.
People living with disabilities.
Direct service with unhoused and marginalized persons.
A rebuilding effort.
Partners include Second Harvest Food Bank, Youth Rebuilding New Orleans, Special Olympics, the New Orleans Mission, City Park, and a dozen more across the metro area.
How hours count
Hours go into MobileServe within a week of the service, verified by a supervisor’s signature or a photo. Qualifying work serves a 501(c)(3), a church, or a youth organization.
Paid work, family obligations, for profit businesses, and fundraising that benefits yourself do not count. The rule of thumb: if it mostly helped you, it was not service.
Questions go to Mr. Baker, who most students know as Brother B, at lbaker@rummelraiders.com.
The full service program ›The Chapel of St. Joseph.
The gym holds the whole school once a week. The Chapel holds whoever comes on his own, which is the harder and more telling number.
Optional Masses are offered here through the week, and the doors stay open between them. Carved across the front of the altar is Animam pro ovibus ponere, from the tenth chapter of John: to lay down one’s life for the sheep. It is the line a shepherd gets held to, and it is the first thing a boy reads when he kneels down.
Open, not scheduled
The Chapel of St. Joseph seats a class rather than a school, which is the point of it. Smaller room, same altar.
The Rosary and Prayer Garden.
A walled garden off the courtyard, laid out as a cross in turf and brick, with Our Lady under the pergola and benches enough for a class. It was built by alumni for the Brother who taught them.
Brother John Fairfax, FSC was there when the doors opened in 1962, as founding Assistant Principal, and he stayed better than twenty five years, as Principal, as a teacher, and as Alumni Director. He named the mascot. He started Raider’s Digest. He took the first Honorary Diploma the school ever awarded, at graduation on May 22, 1977, while he was still principal, and the Alumni Association named him a Raider Legend in 2017.
He had polio. He taught on braces and crutches for the rest of his life and, in the words his students chose for the plaque, never let his condition hinder his mission.
On the plaque
“Brother John Fairfax will forever be remembered as the embodiment of Lasallian Education and Raider Pride.”
Dedicated by Archbishop Emeritus Gregory Aymond and Head of School Matthew Caire at the opening of the 2026 school year, on the initiative of alumni who wanted a permanent memorial to Brother John on campus.
“Change, growth, and improvement come about only in conjunction and cooperation with others.” Br. John Fairfax, Raiders’ Digest, 1971
Prayers a Raider knows by heart.
Two of them. One is prayed for protection, and it is the one a boy remembers when he needs it. The other is not a prayer so much as the way every prayer here begins and ends, and by graduation he could say it in his sleep.
Prayer to St. Michael
St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil.
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray; and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, cast into hell Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls.
Amen.
Written by Pope Leo XIII in 1886, and prayed at Catholic schools and parishes the world over ever since.
How every prayer begins and ends
To beginLet us remember that we are in the holy presence of God.
To endSt. John Baptist de La Salle,pray for us.
Live Jesus in our hearts,forever.
Thank God Almighty,I’m a Raider.
Belize Mission.
The school’s first international mission went to Punta Gorda, and it has gone back since. A week of work replaces a week of talking about it.
Raiders go with students from Archbishop Chapelle, and the work is whatever the village needs that week. They have built the walls of a school kitchen, painted classrooms, carried supplies in, and sat with the sick. They ran a retreat for 170 children that included the first school Mass that community had seen in two years.
Fr. Andrew Gutierrez ’11 and Fr. Rudmann said Sunday Mass with the village of San Marcos and gave first Communion to seven children. A student who has done that in June is a different sophomore in August.
How it runs
Led by Fr. Andrew Gutierrez ’11, the school chaplain, with Campus Ministry.
The team carries in bibles, rosaries, teaching aids, and school supplies, and the trip is underwritten by donors who cover airfare, ground transport, and retreat materials rather than by the families alone.
Campus Ministry.
Forming Men of Faith Since 1962
Eighteen Raiders ordained since the school opened, each shown as the Raider he was on graduation day.
From the Class of 1967 to the Class of 2011.
St. John Baptist de La Salle.
A priest of Reims who gave away a fortune to teach the boys nobody else would, and in doing it invented the modern classroom. Every Lasallian school on earth, Rummel included, is still running his plan.
John Baptist de La Salle was born in 1651 into a family of means and ordained in 1678. He meant to spend his life as a canon of the cathedral. Instead he met a group of poorly trained schoolmasters, took them into his own house, and slowly realized what God was asking. He gave up his canonry and then his inheritance, and with those men founded the Brothers of the Christian Schools in 1680: laymen, not priests, vowed to teach the children of artisans and the poor for free.
He taught in French instead of Latin so boys could actually read. He put students in graded classes instead of one at a time. He opened the first training college for teachers, schools for the sons of the working class, and schools on Sundays for the boys who worked all week. He died on Good Friday, 1719. He was canonized in 1900, and in 1950 Pope Pius XII named him Patron of all Teachers.
The Brothers opened this campus in 1962. The words on the wall, the retreats, the service hours, and the way a teacher here is expected to know a boy by name all come from him. When a Raider says Live Jesus in our hearts, he is finishing a sentence De La Salle started.
Faith
Each young man is invited to be faithful to Jesus Christ, to the Gospel, and to the Spirit. Classroom theology is where that starts, not where it finishes.
Community
A student becomes a Raider the first time he walks onto Severn Avenue. There is no probation on it and nothing to earn first.
Service
130 hours before a diploma, pointed at five different neighbors. The Gospel is read here as a set of instructions rather than a sentiment.
