Las Vegas attorney, special education teacher goes above and beyond for students

The badly faded black-and-white snapshot from the 1960s shows Don Bernard with his parents outside Iowa’s Divine Word College, the only undergraduate Roman Catholic seminary in the United States preparing missionaries to touch the lives of the neediest people around the world.

Back then, Bernard was well on his way to the priesthood.

“You don’t know how life is going to turn out,” the eighth of his parents’ 10 children says, rubbing his shaved head and smiling as he gazes at the photo curling in his hand.

Today, Bernard is a Clark County School District educator. He was honored at the Heart of Education Awards in May for his work with special education students.

And yet as he sits in the study of his North Las Vegas home, Bernard recalls that in the fourth grade he told his parents — Dad worked in a sugar refinery and Mom worked as a domestic — that he knew the priesthood was in his future.

That was shortly after a black priest, the Rev. John Bowman, came to his Louisiana parish in the 1950s with a message he would never forget: People of faith reach out to others less fortunate.

“I’d never seen a black priest, and he was so inspiring I decided my dream was to be like him,” Bernard says.

Though he completed his high school education at a seminary and received his undergraduate college degree from the Divine Word seminary, he started having second thoughts about the priesthood. Finally, after much prayer, he decided he could still adhere to what Father Bowman preached as he followed other pursuits.

He earned a scholarship and became a Tulane University-educated attorney, helping juveniles get a fair break from the justice system. He worked in the law firm of Ernest “Dutch” Morial, who became the first black mayor of New Orleans in 1978.

“One case I’ll never forget is of a boy who got mixed up with the wrong crowd on a robbery,” Bernard says. “We were able to show he wasn’t central to it, and he went on to be a drummer for the Jackson Five.”

He became Louisiana’s first black secretary of commerce, a man Ebony magazine noted in 1982 had developed small-business programs across the state.

“The entrepreneurial instinct in people should be fed,” he says.

After moving to Las Vegas in 1997 — he originally came on legal business — he saw children who needed help and decided to teach special-needs children, earning a doctorate from UNLV along the way.

“People asked me why, with the money I made as an attorney, I’d want to be a teacher,” Bernard says. “The simple answer: I enjoy it.

“I still keep my law license in Louisiana.”

In fact, in February he filed a lawsuit in Louisiana federal court arguing that legal fees awarded in a class-action lawsuit against tobacco companies weren’t distributed fairly.

Michael Barton, the chief academic officer for the school district and a past principal of West Preparatory Academy, where Bernard teaches, says Bernard is always fair with students, “never letting up on expectations.”

At West Prep, he helped Barton set up Saturday classes to improve literacy. One student, unable to speak English when she arrived in middle school, became the valedictorian of her senior class.

Bernard started a writing club after school, often giving McDonald’s gift certificates to students with solid essays.

In nominating Bernard for the Heart of Education Awards — Bernard and 20 other teachers won the coveted awards during a May ceremony at The Smith Center — former elementary school principal Bea Soares noted that when she worked with a group called Nevadans for the Common Good, Bernard always went above and beyond for students.

“He doesn’t give up on students,” she wrote. “Students exhibiting the most challenges, he provides individual assistance.”

In his seventh decade, Bernard, the father of three adult children, has the energy of individuals 40 years younger. He just finished a novel set in New Orleans.

He looks forward to what his students may achieve in the new school year.

“The greatest gratification I receive comes when I observe a former student marching down the aisle to the sound of ‘Pomp and Circumstance,’ he says. “I unabashedly allow rivers of tears to stream down my face, tossing the ‘real men don’t cry myth’ to the winds.”

Paul Harasim’s column runs Sunday, Tuesday and Friday in the Nevada section and Thursday in the Life section. Contact him at pharasim@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-5273. Follow @paulharasim on Twitter.