The case of Our Lady of Sorrows
DeCosse, David E.
THE CASE OF OUR LADY OF SORROWS SUCCESS & CATHOLIC INNER-CITY SCHOOLS DAVID E. DeCOSSE Perhaps the most important thing about Our Lady of Sorrows School on the Lower Last Side of Manhattan is...
...Eighty percent of its students were absorbed by nearby St Bridget's...
...In Manhattan, home to Our Lady of Sorrows, Catholic elementary schools are 50 percent Hispanic, 22 percent black, 16percent white, and 11 percent Asian...
...Professor Coleman in a recent interview spoke of a similar concern: "Our main problem in the United Slates is that nobody pays attention to kids any longer...
...The program had sent Board of Ed teachers into schools like Our Lady of Sorrows for much needed help in guidance counseling, teaching English as a second language, and remedial work in math and reading...
...They want to hold onto you.'' the Spanish teacher said...
...At least Brother James Kearney...
...They hug you...
...said Rose Rivera, who has a son in the third grade at Francis Xavier...
...Again, among its results, it points to great benefits for poor, black, and Hispanic students, as well as for students from "deficient" families of one parent, or where both parents work, or where there is little discussion...
...Then the slips were gathered, placed in a container on the altar, and burned...
...More than 30 percent live in public housing, far above the New York City average...
...South Orange, New Jersey (771I7V (2()l)761-yS7S three" out of twenty-live who might apply art accepted...
...They are almost all Hispanic...
...Robert J. VVisler, AsMxnate IX*an or Zcni Fox, Ph I) . Director of Ijv Ministries Program Immaculate Conception Seminary, School of Theology...
...The hard times of inner-city public schools have cast light on the success of their Catholic counterparts...
...I just react," he said, "that we are the only ones doing a good job...
...Yet perhaps even more important than the enduring building is the elementary schooPs principal...
...Costs are up, pushed mostly by lay teachers" salaries which everyone —teachers, principals', and superintendents— seems to agree aren't high enough in the first place but are all the system can bear...
...In 1982, critics of Professor Coleman said his study on high schexils was not adjusted for a "selectivity bias...
...within six blocks of Francis Xavier, where (he enrollment has fallen by 100 over nine years, there are three other Catholic elementary schools...
...The critics claimed Catholic school students were from more affluent backgrounds, backgrounds which valued education more highly...
...F.M.S...
...was one of seven schools in a fourteen-block area...
...For some parents, fear, more than anything, prompts them to send their children to Catholic schools...
...Brother Mike knows what he'd do: "I'd put "cm out of business tomorrow," he said, snapping his fingers...
...Students of Our Lady of Sorrows offered vivid descriptions of the neighborhood...
...Studies have borne out the schools' effectiveness, particularly for poor, black, and Hispanic students Much of this work has been done by Professor James S Coleman and one of his graduate students, Thomas Hoffer, and by Father Andrew Greelcy...
...Then there are phones, heating, and supplies...
...Phone costs over the last years have bounced from $40 and S50 monthly to $130...
...Mock scenes are set up...
...In fact...
...Libia Carroll has seen the change in her sixteen years of teaching at Our l.ady of Sorrows...
...Brother John Shento, O.F.M...
...The children oohed and aahed and craned their necks in a sea of movement...
...And now they be making crack and sniffing cocaine right in front of your face...
...The National Catholic Education Association reported ninetyseven school closings in 1986-87, a whopping and unexpected increase over a recent low of thirteen in 1983-84...
...Selon Hall University...
...The tests are given to all non-handicapped students...
...On the wall behind the altar rests a grey, plaster pieta given to the parish years ago by the King of Bavaria...
...If archdiocesan officials don't exactly covet the Board of Education's money, they certainly dream fancifully of what they'd do with some of its S3.7 billion annual budget...
...The mutual affection is obvious Whatever is most important to Our Lady of Sorrows, these two qualities—of stability and community —are being pointed to as keys behind the increasingly recognized success of poor and minority children in Catholic schools...
...they kiss you, they're very affectionate...
...The new study has been adjusted to meet that criticism...
...The American bishops allude to parochial schools' importance in their pastoral letter on the economy...
...At the turn of the century Italian immigrant children began filling its classrooms...
...The IPFC, which taxes parishes on a prorated scale, makes grants to parishes in financial straits The Scholarship Fund, which raised S3 million this year from foundations, corporations, and gala benefits, grants money specifically to seventy-nine schools in hard times, largely making up the difference between tuition and actual costs, which at Francis Xavier for instance, runs respectively for one child of a parishioner at S700 and SI,300...
...From 1970 to 1984, throughout the country, minority enrollment increased from 9.5 percent to 20.2 percent, while overall enrollment declined by 26 percent, from 4.7 million to 3 million students...
...one or two other children in the school would only cost $100 annually for each...
...The students in need of help file out, but the teachers in the vans, perhaps in need of making a phone call, cannot file into the school building without stretching the law...
...Indeed, Professor Coleman's most recent study {Public and Private High Schools, Basic Books, 1987...
...Parents, Brother John said, usually are glad to say okay...
...Twenty percent of the students are non-Catholic, largely Protestants, in Harlem...
...The dome of the church has paintings of the story of Our Lady of Sorrows...
...The 1980 Census lists 28.7 percent below the poverty level...
...The two archdiocesan-wide safety nets are typical of other measures recently established or being undertaken around the country...
...Puerto Ricans began coming to the area near Pitt and Stanton Streets...
...Ten cases of paper, which last two months, go for $400...
...Then, in the late 1940s...
...The principal at the time of the closing...
...The children file out quietly, kidding him as he turns their caps around or pokes them lightly in the side...
...Superintendent of Schools of the Archdiocese of New York, expects so: "It's going to hit the presses and of course you're going to have the public schools out in force and saying it's ridiculous...
...We've been here for a long time and we hope to remain here...
...Often money for school comes from a grandfather or uncle, or a parent on welfare works, or families go without insurance or phones or have two parents working Of those who can't afford to pay...
...Charles, where often kids cannot go out and play because of danger...
...But even as valued as many parochial schools are, they keep closing, burdened by finances and declining enrollment...
...One possible measure is the annual State Pupil Evaluation Test, given in the elementary schools in the third, fifth, and sixth grades...
...He added that the fallout from the Supreme Court decision has meant that "60 percent of the eligible students under the law, who arc poor and who need help in math and reading, are not getting it...
...I'm sure there are a lot of other people | like them) out there...
...Add to this a declining enrollment caused by a declining school-age population, higher tuition, and the thickening walls between stale help for parochial schools, and you have the need for all kinds of cost-cutting and financial creativity...
...But that Catholic schools are highly valued by minorities 10 April 1987: 211 and successful at educating them is one development partly obscuring another—that these schools in urban areas even serve such a population, not a well-heeled elite...
...I think we've done all that we can with vans," said Brother Kearney...
...Jack had spoken of the need to give things up and do good works, all the students were invited to write on a slip of paper some bad habit they wished to be free of...
...We're moving onto other things...
...DAVID F DeCOSSK...
...a former reporter for the East Hampton Star (,V...
...The other way that schools deal with the turmoil of the street or...
...Bishop Moore was more conciliatory...
...Indeed...
...In one a St...
...many kids at the local junior high carried guns...
...Chocolate Santas were a strong product for Our Lady of Sorrows last year, pulling in $3,000 of the $55.(XX) the school raised on its own...
...With shoulder-length brown hair and a mustache...
...Charles, he said, offers education "in a way that's better than the public schools...
...THE CASE OF OUR LADY OF SORROWS SUCCESS & CATHOLIC INNER-CITY SCHOOLS DAVID E. DeCOSSE Perhaps the most important thing about Our Lady of Sorrows School on the Lower Last Side of Manhattan is the building...
...Brother John said...
...Charles Borromeo presides over the highly successful parish school in Harlem which the pope visited in 1979, commented: ' 'The church and the school stand as a symbol of hope for a lot of people...
...The schools' selectivity seems to vary...
...The last school closed in Manhattan, Most Holy Redeemer in the summer of 1985...
...perhaps, of home, is a mix of the personal and spiritual...
...If the building has stood as a sign to the community, these people have brought 210: Commonweal life to that sign...
...I think it would be reasonable to close another one...
...When the ruling came down, the Board, which is legally required to provide the remedial help, first suggested that the Catholic school kids go to public schools for a remedial class, a prospect which terrified some parents although this arrangement has apparently worked in various places...
...amid the regular fare of classes, that the schools deal with this is an eight-week drug prevention program run by the New York City Police Department...
...Another criterion is academics...
...He echoed his brother black bishops, who in their 1984 pastoral, "What We Have Seen and Heard," stated: "We cannot overemphasize the tremendous importance of parochial schools for the black community...
...214: Commonweal But beneath discipline, friendship, high standards, more homework, and a clear set of values, the schools have their spiritual bulwark...
...But the primary source of income is tuition...
...Bishop Emerson Moore of Manhattan, who as pastor of St...
...Comparisons of achievement arc difficult, given the different types of students in the systems...
...Teachers tactically took up position between the biggest talkers...
...After Annie, a pudgy student, had run onto the beige marble sanctuary to read loudly from Isaiah, and after Fr...
...The main thing a few' years back was the needle," Denisc...
...The side walls depict the heroics of Franciscan saints...
...sec review, page 216) is certain to stir sharp debate as his 1982 study did...
...The children responded by finishing the song in a happy, halfshout: "Glory, glory, glory hallelujah, children of the Lord...
...Moore, a product of the public schools (he attended them through junior high) was sensitive to the mandate of the public schools to educate all students, from the well-behaved to those with severe discipline records...
...The murmuring turned into melody, if too quiet for the principal...
...Now the four-story, rusty brick building, lined by an old black iron gate and whitewashed by roosting pigeons, educates 358 children...
...From such comfort he jokes with the other teachers, puffs Tareyton 100's, and sips herbal tea But at 8:30 he's off, clanging a hand-held golden bell down the stairs beneath the cross of San Damiano, through the tiny courtyard where five or six kids are playing a game of tag called "Johney...
...The surrounding streets swim in crack and cocaine...
...Charles fifth-grader, playing "the kid," for $ 1.000 took a bag of unknown contents from a so-called Slick Rick...
...But while inner-city Catholic schools may seem in places a haven from some of the violence of the public schools, they, too, must deal with their own discipline problems as well as the violence of the street, of television and movies, and...
...Father Jack Donahue, C.S.C., who now teaches at Our Lady of Sorrows, spoke of the pain of shutting the doors, but said: "The closing of one...
...The Board of Ed itself notes that in 1985-86 there were 1.487 reported incidents of weapons possession and 1,629 reported assaults (assaults being fights, knifings, and shootings...
...Non-parishioners pay a first-child tuition of $900, again with $100 for each added child afterward...
...They (the public schools] have a problem and we've all got to help them...
...Francis Xavier Grade School, called a continual "apostolate of the patchwork: You do some windows today, you do some windows tomorrow, hoping to stave off huge outlays...
...The New York Archdiocese, which includes Staten Island, Manhattan, the Bronx, and northern counties stretching almost to Albany, faces a host of problems in its inner-city schools, as in all of its schools...
...We have this same concern — safety...
...Despite 90 percent of the children at Our Lady of Sorrows being on some kind of public 212: Commonweal assistance, only three families cannot afford to pay and their costs are covered by a Capuchin fund...
...Then Brother John signaled for the final song...
...But even these fundraising and cost-cutting efforts at many schools would never cover expenses...
...Old school buildings with old wiring and pipes and roofs and windows require what Brother Mike Deegan, C.F.C., principal of St...
...In any case, the days of the van are numbered...
...School begins...
...They were joined in the sixties by Dominicans...
...chocolate bunnies may have hit a saturated market at Easter, earning only $1,800...
...Insurance has shot up At Francis Xavier the same comprehensive liability policy that cost S3,800 in 1985-86 now runs $17,000, and even that figure was negotiated down from almost $30,000...
...But the flip side of funds like IPFC is perhaps that they discourage penny-pinching and needlessly keep some schools open...
...To scrimp a dollar, teachers might pitch in to unclo'g toilets or grades might consolidate (to the great dismay of parents...
...A fast murmur ensued...
...Without that help and the Scholarship Fund, he said, "this school wouldn't exist...
...At Our Lady of Sorrows, for a parishioner with one child in the school, the cost is $800 annually...
...Because the system is decentralized, this burden falls first on the schools, which m a sense arc like strapped businesses dependent entirely on their tuition-paying customers...
...It's difficult to instill in our kids the Christian value that we must respect and love our neighbor, that we must not do harm...
...Secretary of Education William Bennett has also trumpeted their cause...
...even of two, would have been reasonable...
...Now much of the remedial help is provided in vans parked on parochial school parking lots or on the streets out front...
...He will take anyone in pre-kindergarten (an increasingly common feature of Catholic schools to help working parents) or kindergarten, but then tests knowledge of such things as the alphabet or colors before first grade...
...10 April 1987: 215...
...Perhaps the sting of ongoing urban poverty over the efficacy of some programs has united liberals and conservatives in the church behind the schools as outposts of faith, human dignity, and the battle against poverty...
...In the ten largest urban archdioceses, minority enrollment is at least 30 percent, with blacks predominating in such cities as Chicago, Washington, DC, and Detroit, and Hispanics in New York and Los Angeles...
...the building has survived...
...and into the buzzing cafeteria, a swirl of faces and knapsacks...
...some fifty attend the neighborhood storefront Pentecostal churches...
...Brother John 10 April 1987: 213 shared the resentment: "Personally, I have no use for the Board...
...One way...
...22 automatics mostly.'' Many of the same problems afflict the area around St...
...All the while, the Board of Eds cost per student at the elementary level is $4,415...
...It was built in 1874 by the German-Swiss founders of this Capuchin parish...
...Oil at Our Lady of Sorrows last year cost $1,200 a month, although this year, with prices down, it has fallen to $630...
...The change has been recent...
...They are required to take Catholic religion clas es...
...Brother John sits deep in a soft chair in the teachers' lounge before school starts, his legs, beneath his brown Franciscan robe and white cincture, stretching onto a fooirest in a posture of gathering strength...
...I don't hear you," he challenged after one verse...
...an eighth-grader, said...
...Then vans were suggested, and the Board bought some...
...Crucifixes were removed from the rooms of instruction, and there was no talk of religion...
...Brother John said his school catered "to the elite of this area,"' and was too financially strapped to take on children in need of special education, or who only speak Spanish, or who have serious emotional problems...
...Fierce pressure mounts to develop luxury apartments out of old, fire-escape-ringed tenements...
...sometimes they are asked to repeat a grade...
...Aaron, another eighth-grader, detailed the latest in local drugs: "bluestar," he said, something like angel dust, was now on the street, as were "blunts...
...A first-year teacher in the archdiocese starts at S 14,600, while a first-year teacher for the New York City Board of Education begins at $18,500...
...Brother John tests on questions from a sixth grade reader and asks for facility in subtraction, addition, multiplication, and division "Maybe IMMACULATE CONCEPTION SEMINARY School of Theology Seton Hall University Summer 1987 First Session Second Session June22-July 9 July 13-July 30 Wisdom Literature j American Christianity and the I'salms James Hennesey Arthur Serratelli Catholic Social leaching Christian F.thics II ludith Ihi'i/er Russell Connors Pauline Literature Sacraments of Initiation lames Turro Walter Cuenin The I-lucharist Luke-Arts Michael Driscoll \ohn Heil ¦ Organisational Behavior Early Christianity Mane Schulteiann Timothy Man Contemporary Issues in licclesiology Catechetics Michael Walsh Maureen Shaughnessy Planning Skills Nature of Di^ipleship William Harms : Alan Vigneron Further Information...
...cigars injected with cocaine, "willablunts," cigars injected with crack, and all sons of candy that strange men offer you in the hope, Aaron said, of hooking you on the crack or coke inside it...
...And yet the building, with "School of Christian Doctrine"' hewn out above the door, has survived, a steadfast sign of commitment (o the community...
...Cooperation between the systems sometimes tends to the absurd...
...In Baltimore, for instance, the Lawrence Cardinal Shehan Scholarship Fund provided more than $500,000 of assistance in 1984-85...
...Many teachers and administrators said the greatest need of their students was for someone to listen to them (if possible, with more counselors), a situation brought on by having only one parent, who perhaps works, or two who work, or one or two wh-> simply don't talk much with their kids...
...Average tuition at Catholic high schools in New York City is $1,400 a year...
...In Philadelphia, a major effort is well along to raise money to establish a permanent fund by soliciting businesses who have or could benefit from hiring Catholicschool graduates...
...Making moral decisions can get complicated easily on such crime-laden streets, especially because, the students say, pushers brazenly seek out children as couriers or clients, dangling money or dope before them...
...Brother Kearney said New York was considering a similar plan with the aim of making a place for anyone, even if tuition was out of their reach...
...As he playfully headed toward the drop with one Big Joe, the officer just as playfully said, "All right, you're under arrest," spreading his hands high on the wall and his legs apart on the floor to shrieks from the class...
...Bishop Moore said that one of the struggles of the schixil was to overcome the student.' own inclination to violence, a trait especially apparent over the last three to five years...
...We've noticed that our children are becoming less nonviolent," he said...
...After the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the use of Chapter 1 funds for programs in parochial school build ings, in the summer of 1985 all sorts of arrangements were hatched...
...To handle the usual rush of students applying for the seventh grade to evade the local junior high...
...Indeed, this seems a signal moment for such schools...
...Cap., and his band of teachers...
...Once a week an officer comes to the fifth and sixth grades to discuss decision-making...
...On Ash Wednesday, the pre-kindergarten through fifth grades at Our Lady of Sorrows headed into their church, built in 1867, for what Brother John called a paraliturgy...
...Perhaps an effect of the study's release will be a more emphatic call for what Brother Kearney termed parental "tax reliefs, tax credits, tax deductions...
...Where they go is before an archdioccsan board which administers the Inter-Parish Finance Commission, a creation, along with the Inner-City Scholarship Fund, of the late Cardinal Terence Cooke...
...Brother John explained: "Around April of every year you run out of money and have to go for a command performance, the pastor and the principal...
...Everything gets sold —cakes, raffle chances, T-shirts, tickets to Halloween dances...
...This year as well twenty-one schools have opened, mostly scattered in the western states...
...On those, students in non-public schools in New York City, more than 80percent of which arc Catholic, scored from eight to twenty-one points higher on reading, writing, and math than students in the public schools...
...Sometimes you don't have time between classes...
...90 percent are on some kind of public assistance...
...Then the officer said: "All right, you know there's something wrong with this guy: How many guys you know named Slick Rick...
...not infrequently, of home...
...Last year Brother John's command performance garnered an $80,000, no-strings-attached grant from IPFC...
...This is a neighborhood of fear and flux and very tight budgets...
...In New York City, for example, a debate is currently underway over whether the public high school dropout rate is 37 percent (the Board of Ed figure) or 54 percent (the figure of a parents' monitoring group...
...Y.), is presently doing graduate studies in philosophy and Scripture...
Vol. 114 • April 1987 • No. 7
