Cover
story Pooled efforts start new school
By PATRICIA
LEFEVERE Special Report Writer Baltimore
Planning experts certainly would have told them to forget it long
before the project ever got started.
After all, this is not the time to start talking about low-cost
Catholic education. Or staffing schools with more nuns and priests. Or starting
up in the inner city, particularly a city with one of the worst high school
dropout rates in the country.
And even if all such reality checks were ignored, those involved
at least would be looking for the kids who had the best chance of succeeding,
not those doubly damned with poverty and low academic skills.
Four years ago, however, six religious congregations turned all
the "givens" upside down here in Baltimore. Intent on living out a mission of
service to the poor, they pooled personnel and finances to found and run Mother
Seton Academy, a school for some of the city's most impoverished and
educationally deprived middle-schoolers.
The religious collaborators are the Daughters of Charity,
Franciscan Sisters of Philadelphia, Sisters Servants of the Immaculate Heart of
Mary of Scranton, School Sisters of Notre Dame, the Marianists and the Xaverian
Brothers.
The school is named after America's first canonized saint,
Elizabeth Seton, who founded the Daughters of Charity of St. Joseph,
established orphanages and hospitals for the poor and devoted herself to the
parochial schools of Maryland.
Since opening in 1993, Mother Seton Academy has had an enrollment
of 60 sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders. Many pupils enter with second-grade
level reading and writing skills. When they graduate three years later, all are
at eighth-grade levels and gain admission to the city's best parochial and
public schools.
Such unlikely results are achieved with unlikely dedication and
generosity, including nearly a quarter of a million dollars in donated time
from the faculty. The school is now in its second location, the former convent
of St. Stanislaus Church in the Fells Point area of the city. A local
architectural firm contributed the plans for the conversion of the convent into
classrooms, and a $75,000 grant from another local firm provided funds for the
initial renovation.
Catholic school was once "unthinkable" for the city's
educationally and financially disadvantaged youth, said Shannon Clancy, the
school's development director. However, parents pay no tuition at Mother Seton.
They are asked to give $10 a month ($100 annually) toward books, supplies and
field trips. The donation "reinforces some responsibility and helps people to
feel connected to the school," Clancy said.
When poverty is calculated in the United States, the results look
much like the children at Mother Seton. Poverty means youngsters without
sufficient schooling, health care, nutrition, parenting or individual
attention.
And Baltimore has more than its share of impoverished kids.
Earlier this year, a study by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a national group
based here and dedicated to enhancing the lives of disadvantaged children,
found that 32 percent of the city's children live in poverty or in households
receiving public assistance and 33 percent live in what the "City Kids Count"
Survey defined as "distressed areas."
Of 50 cities surveyed, only Dallas and St. Louis had worse
high-school dropout rates than Baltimore, where 21 percent of 16- to
19-year-olds dropped out of high school in 1990. The city ranked third highest
in percentage of births to teenagers under age 18 -- 11 percent of Baltimore's
births.
Daughter of Charity Sr. Mary Bader and her staff are well aware of
the study and know that all the school's students come from households
receiving some form of federal assistance. "Things are getting much tougher for
children," Bader said, noting that academy officials have learned that federal
medical assistance will no longer accept certain centers used by the school for
educational and psychological testing so important "for the choosing and
serving of these children," she said.
Welfare reform has also cut into the federal aid some of the
pupils' families once received.
Besides the dedication of staff and volunteers, a little luck and
answered prayers keep the academy afloat, Bader said. Last month someone
donated a 1993 van with new tires. Other donations and fundraising activities
have netted $60,000 of the school's $493,000 1997-98 budget. A further $140,000
comes from corporate and other grants, including $25,000 from the archdiocese's
Partners in Excellence Program.
But the bulk of the school's finances is contributed by the eight
sisters and two brothers whose donated services are valued at $224,000 and
whose religious congregations have given $80,000 to the school.
Four out of five academy students are non-Catholic, although all
take religion classes that use Catholic texts. Teachers make it a point to be
inclusive of the students' different religious traditions, said Bader.
Bader, the school's principal, said teachers try to involve
students in various prayer experiences. Classroom prayer occurs and so does the
celebration of the Jewish Seder meal and the African-American festival of
Kwanza.
As important as religion classes are -- especially for inculcating
values and respect for others -- so, too, are classes in math, language arts,
science, social studies, literature, computer skills and health, she said.
Seventh- and eighth-graders also learn Spanish.
When school began Sept. 2, six of 24 sixth-graders were Hispanic
students, many of them coming from Spanish-speaking homes, Bader said. The six
represent the highest percentage of Latino students in a grade level, she said,
and indicate the growth of the city's Hispanic population.
This year's 24 new students were chosen from 63 who attended a
two-week summer school session in July, which devoted 10 mornings to academics
and 10 afternoons to recreation. Because of the school's intentionally small
size, "many are turned away who should be here," lamented Bader.
All who attended the summer sessions qualified financially to
attend the academy, so teachers were looking for those who were having trouble
in their current school and who showed a need for individual attention, said
Clancy. Teachers also are looking for those they hope will do well in a college
preparatory high school, said Clancy.
"There's a lot of prayer, discernment and discussion that go into
these choices," she said. "In the end, we hope we've chosen the kids who'll
benefit from this environment."
While all students must demonstrate financial need in order to
attend, not all come from single-parent families, broken homes or achieve below
grade level. "It's helpful to have a mixture of kids who are academically ahead
and come from stable families," Clancy said.
By paying close attention to each student, limiting class size and
insisting on homework, the school's faculty has been able to move students out
of some of the lowest-performing categories into grade-equivalent or higher
levels.
"Our students were not used to doing much homework," said
Franciscan Sr. Ruth Bernadette O'Connor, who teaches seventh-grade boys. "We
try to break old habits and make new ones. We help kids to organize themselves,
to plan things and to plan for their lives," she said.
Basic values that some might "take for granted," such as honesty
and refraining from sexual relations outside of marriage, are unknown to many
pupils at academy, she said. " 'Is that so?' they often ask me."
Although the school day runs from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., students
arrive and eat breakfast at school at 7:45 and stay until at least 5 p.m. "It's
a long day, but it gives kids the structures they crave," O'Connor said. "It
gives us time to deal with each individual, and the small number allows them to
know one another."
Attachments can run deep. "It feels like a family here," said
Ayrea O'Neal, who graduated in May and wants to become a pediatrician. Her
classmate, Jahaira Zuniga, wants to be an astronaut.
Wendy Lewis, a member of the 1996 graduating class, has returned
as a tutor. She intends to enter the police academy after graduating from high
school.
Mother Seton Academy makes such dreams possible. Students here
speak of newfound confidence in their abilities to learn. They tell of not
having to show off to get attention. They talk of the love they receive from
staff and teachers.
And they display their affection for a school favorite, Javert,
the guinea pig who got his name from the musical "Les Miserables." The play was
on the itinerary of several students who were able to take a trip to New York
thanks to a donor.
The school has achieved some national prominence with the work of
Quiebonnie McDonald, an eighth-grader who wrote about "Love" and had her poem
published in the Anthology of Poetry by Young Americans.
The closeness of students to school and each other was evident in
early June when the eighth-graders returned voluntarily after graduation to do
odd jobs and help the staff.
Students learn to clean after school each day. They stay to
participate in sports and to do an hour's supervised homework. Several remain
for supper and for extra tutoring three nights each week with one of the 25
volunteers -- many of them students from Loyola College here.
Members of the Values and Services Center of Loyola, a Jesuit
college, have formed a partnership with the academy. While Loyola sends trainee
teachers to the academy, "our students educate Loyola students about poverty
issues," Bader said.
Marist Br. Charles Johnson, who teaches eighth-grade boys and is
the school's only full-time male teacher, said of the different men's and
women's orders working at Mother Seton, "It takes lots of cooperation, but
we're all committed to what the school is about."
Donors have made possible journeys to historic Gettysburg,
Washington and Philadelphia. A guest speaker program has brought Maryland Sens.
Barbara Mikulski and Paul Sarbanes and Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke to school
as well as actor Clark Johnson of the TV series "Homicide," which is filmed
near the school's South Anne Street location. Cardiologist John DuBois Dubin
has taken students to the hospital where he works and has brought a brain to
school to explain the effects of drugs.
All of it -- tutoring, tours, guest speakers -- are part of the
academy's broad approach to Catholic education, Clancy said.
"The smallest thing you do might have enormous influence," added
O'Connor. "You just pray."
National Catholic Reporter, September 5,
1997
|