On December 7, our school community gathered to celebrate our 38th Founders Banquet, an event held to acknowledge the incredible generosity of our gracious donors. We honored Mr. Gene Tullier, former CHS President, as he was inducted into the CHS Hall of Fame!

Gene Tullier’s connection with CHS began long before he was born. In 1903, his grandfather, Ira Tullier, attended St. Vincent’s Academy, and his father, Gerald J. Tullier was a 1940 CHS alumnus. Gene did not attend CHS, but his high school, St. Joseph Cathedral Prep School, a high school seminary, was housed at the old Catholic High School campus on North Street after CHS relocated to Claycut Road. He graduated from Sacred Heart Elementary School and Cathedral Prep. He continued his seminary training through college and post-graduate studies, receiving his B.A. in Philosophy from St. Joseph Seminary College in Covington and a master’s in theological studies from Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans. Upon leaving the seminary in 1975, he worked for three-and-a-half years in refugee resettlement for Associated Catholic Charities in the Archdiocese of New Orleans, eventually becoming the director of refugee services for the Archdiocese.

Gene’s legacy with the Brothers of the Sacred Heart encompasses 45 years. He joined the faculty of Brother Martin High School in New Orleans, in 1978, beginning as a religion and English teacher. While teaching at Brother Martin, he continued his graduate education receiving an M.Ed. from the University of New Orleans in 1984. At Brother Martin, he served in several roles, including English Department chair, assistant principal, disciplinarian, vice principal, and principal for seven years. Gene was principal when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, flooding Brother Martin and making the campus unusable during the first semester of that year.

Knowing that his students, their families, and other New Orleans students dislocated by Katrina needed the normalcy of attending school, Gene led the effort to open a temporary campus for Brother Martin in Baton Rouge. Along with other members of the Brother Martin leadership team, he worked out a plan with the Catholic High School administration to share the CHS campus, with CHS shifting to a slightly earlier daytime schedule and Brother Martin operating in the late afternoon and evenings. Thanks to that plan, more than 600 students, boys, and girls from Catholic and public schools in the New Orleans area who had been displaced by Hurricane Katrina, were able to resume their education less than three weeks after being displaced from their homes.

Repair work on the Brother Martin campus took place that fall, and Gene led the reopening of Brother Martin High School on its own New Orleans campus in January of 2006. In appreciation to the Catholic High School community for their generosity in sharing the CHS campus in a time of extraordinary need, Brother Martin High School President, John Devlin, removed a brick from the school’s main entrance and presented it to the CHS community at the conclusion of the fall semester in 2005. That brick, and a brief explanatory plaque, is permanently installed in the main lobby of CHS. The space from which the brick was taken from the entrance of Brother Matin remains an empty gap in the brick façade. The brick and the gap represent the permanent connection between the two schools forged through the extraordinary events in the fall of 2005. It is also an apt symbol of Gene’s career serving both schools.

Gene began his tenure as president of Catholic High on July 1, 2006, in preparation for the start of the 2006-2007 school year. As president, Gene led CHS through much-needed expansion of facilities, a substantial increase in total student enrollment, an increase in need-based tuition assistance, acquisition of contiguous real-estate to provide non-tuition revenue, an increase of the diversity of both the faculty and student body, and salary and benefit increases for faculty and staff. During his tenure, CHS was also recognized two more times, in 2014 and 2020, which made a total of six recognitions as a Blue Ribbon School of Excellence.

Guiding each of the major initiatives in Gene’s career was his steadfast commitment to the CHS mission of forming young men in Gospel values and his recognition that long-term sustainability of the CHS mission could be assured only through continuous striving for excellence, maintaining CHS as affordable and accessible for families who desired Catholic education, and compensation for faculty and staff that allowed them to support their families through a career at CHS.

In addition to his contributions at CHS, Gene has co-authored two Brothers of the Sacred Heart pedagogical documents. He retired as CHS president on June 30, 2023, having served in Catholic education for 45 years – 28 years at Brother Martin High School in New Orleans and 17 years at Catholic High School. However, he continues to serve on the CHS Foundation Board of Directors, the Hearthstone Properties Board of Directors, and the Brothers of the Sacred Heart of New York, Inc. Board of Directors.

He and his wife, Adriane, have three children, Damien Tullier, Marcel Tullier, and Jeanne Tullier Takyi, and seven grandchildren ages 9 to 22.

Here are few snapshots of the evening's festivities.