| | Issue #19.35 :: 03/26/2008 - 04/01/2008 | Small sacrifices, big changes.
Despite the highest test scores in the diocese, a century-old Catholic elementary faces dropping enrollment head on with a plan to move from Laney Walker to Telfair Street
| BY TOM GRANT
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AUGUSTA, GA - In a tiny chapel on Laney Walker Boulevard, Father Fortunate Bijura points to the Stations of the Cross and asks the eighth graders, “Who is this Simon?”
“He’s the person who helped Jesus carry the cross,” answers Kaylin Walker, one of the nine students.
But Father Fortunate wants the students to understand that Simon did not intend to carry the cross. “He was forced to,” he says and looks around the room. “Who can tell us something you did for somebody this week? Who did dishes for your mother?”
Six hands rise in the air. “This week you were Simon for the family,” Father Fortunate says, pointing out that their small sacrifice was part of the chain of sacrifices that moves a family forward. “You say, ‘Let me take the cross for you for a while.’”
Father Fortunate is himself carrying the cross a few steps this morning. A priest from Tanzania, he now lives in the rectory above the chapel at Immaculate Conception School and teaches religious classes to the students.
In 1913, when Immaculate Conception School was founded, Franciscan nuns carried that cross, teaching all the classes at the school. Under the nuns, the last of whom left in 2004, it became one of the best schools in the community, turning out such achievers as former presidential hopeful Alan Keyes and former Augusta Commissioner Keith Brown.
These days, Immaculate Conception is still turning out achievers. Students at this elementary have some of the highest scores in the Catholic Diocese of Savannah area.
“Most of our students come from working-class African-American families, and yet we can outperform any other socioeconomic group of students based on our test scores,” said Principal Jonathan Pike, who picked up the cross this year.
But the school has come to a turning point. Last year, the school faced a huge uncertainty about whether it would remain open. Despite its tuition of only $2,800 per year — about half what other Catholic schools charge — many parents took their children to other schools. This year, Immaculate Conception opened with only 70 students. Now it’s about to take a dramatic step.
Next fall, Immaculate Conception will break away from its Laney Walker roots and move downtown to Telfair Street.
In 1913, America sat on the verge of World War I. Education for African Americans was limited. The public high school for blacks had been closed in 1897 and no public high school would be offered again until 1938. Blacks depended on private schools.
The Missionary Franciscan Sisters operated an orphanage on 12th Street. They were asked to teach the children at the Immaculate Conception Church on Laney Walker.
After five years teaching an elementary, the nuns added a high school. The first class, six women and one man, graduated in 1923. By 1953, when the Supreme Court Case Brown vs. Board of Education began the movement to desegregate schools, Immaculate Conception grads had found their way to many top colleges, from Fordham to the University of Georgia. In 1963, a graduate was accepted at Harvard.
In the late ’60s, the heart of the civil rights era, all schools were being pushed to integrate. As part of the effort, Immaculate Conception closed its high school in 1967 and encouraged its students to attend Aquinas.
The church was changing, too. In the 1970s, the downtown parishes consolidated and Immaculate Conception Church closed. The church was renovated to become a convent for the sisters, but their order, too, was in flux. They were aging and, gradually, their role was taken over by lay teachers.
The neighborhood changed, as well. Once a vibrant street, Laney Walker declined. Today, Immaculate Conception is surrounded by a number of vacant buildings. Burglary and vandalism became a problem. Enrollment fell.
Principal Pike spent his career in public schools, starting in southern Georgia at Thomasville, rising to his first principal’s job in Pelham and eventually moving to Columbia County. “This is my first time in private education,” Pike said. “I found a school in dire straits.”
Devoutly religious, Pike has great respect for the Franciscan Sisters and their mission to reach out and serve an underprivileged segment of the community. But despite nearly a century of Franciscan devotion to teaching — of carrying the cross of educating inner-city children on the shoulders of nuns — the school, Pike found, had “no endowment, no savings, no financial cushion whatsoever.”
In recent years, church leaders had undertaken a continuing debate over whether to close the school. Each year, it remained open thanks to donations that covered the gap between income and expenses.
“I knew I had to come in and do something different and use my experience to try to save the school,” he said.
On the brighter side, his immediate predecessor had been a strong educator. “Mrs. Bertha Sutton, a retired principal, ran the school three years prior,” Pike said. “She raised the bar academically and discipline-wise to get back to where it was years ago. And she did a wonderful job of doing that.”
However, uncertainty had taken its toll. Keeping teachers was difficult. But Pike saw great potential in two things: the intimacy of the school and the religious foundation.
Pike had become disenchanted with public education.
“The problem was public education was growing too big and had leaders who didn’t know how to deal with it,” Pike said. “I had learned that it is true that one of the most important deciding factors in a good academic environment is size.”
He had seen high schools grow to the size of small colleges as they attempted to find economies of scale. “You just cannot have a good academic environment when you’re trying to manage 2,000 bodies in one building. And when you look at class size, the same thing is true,” Pike said.
Pike says the average class size at his public school was close to 30 students. “We’re going to try to keep our class size maxed out at 15 — half of that,” Pike said.
With only 70 students in grades pre-K though 8, the school averages about seven students per class now.
Marlena Rowland teaches a combined class — four second-graders and six third-graders. All the students wear uniforms. All are polite and well-behaved. She sits in front and opens a book to read to the students.
“Learning-wise, they can really cover a lot of information and you can really work well with the small groups,” Rowland said, drawing on her seven years of experience teaching in larger school.
That’s one reason why students at Immaculate Conception have some of the best reading scores in the city.
Rowland also says that small classes make it much easier for a teacher to get to know the student’s entire family, and to understand what’s happening in the child’s life.
Angela Hendrickson, the media specialist (or librarian, as students once might have said), started her education career as a classroom teacher. “I really did not like being in public schools,” she said. Immaculate Conception, on the other hand, has “been wonderful.”
For Hendrickson, the key is faith. “I really like being able to talk about religion,” she said. “I think when you teach a whole child, religion can be a big part of life, if you let it be.”
Her ideas frame an argument older than Immaculate Conception School itself. In 1908, Cardinal Gibbons, the Archbishop of Baltimore, lamented in The New York Times, “We are fast becoming a de-Christianized nation; and that is because of our public schools, from which Christ is debarred.”
He predicted serious declines in society because of it. “If this be allowed to continue, I see no remedy among a great portion of our countrymen for our many and growing vices, and divorce, theft, manslaughter, suicide, the murder of the innocents will have an ever-increasing number of victims, for our school system, as it is now operated, is, and has shown that it is, incapable of checking the evils… Education without virtue breeds the shrewdest criminals, whereas the perfect man and citizen is not only intelligent, but also virtuous, and therefore religious.”
John Bartkowski, a sociologist at Mississippi State University, provided some support to the notion that religion is good for kids in a 2007 study. In looking at more than 16,000 children, he found that those whose parents regularly attended religious services were rated by teachers as having greater self-control, social skills and approaches to learning than kids with non-religious parents.
A study by Dr. Enzo Luttmer, an associate professor of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School, showed that disadvantaged children from religious families were more likely to finish high school and seek higher education.
Those findings have been challenged by other experts, who say the key is not whether the parents are involved in church, but whether they’re involved in any strong social networks, be that a political group, a bowling league or a church.
But Pike has faith that religion gives educators an edge.
“It’s a great environment for children,” he said. “We’re not learning about sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. Our students are learning about the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
Keith Brown, who graduated from eighth grade at Immaculate Conception in 1975, attended kindergarten at the school, then attended Episcopal Day School in grades one through six.
He returned to Immaculate Conception for junior high and eventually went on to Aquinas.
Like most of the students at Immaculate Conception, he was Protestant, not Catholic. But he got a great Catholic education.
“It was a great education, great,” he said. Just as today, students wore uniforms. “The nuns were really strict as far as discipline, education, everything.”
His parents were deeply committed to the education of their children. They sent all seven of his brothers and sisters to Immaculate Conception and Aquinas.
“I think several things made the school successful,” Brown said. One, the students and parents have made an investment in their education. Any time you make an investment, you’re going to be more inclined to try to benefit from that investment.
“Also, I think, they do not put up with discipline problems. The focus is on education instead of maintaining order in the classroom.”
But Brown remembers a different neighborhood than the one where Immaculate Conception sits in today. “At that time, Laney Walker was booming. There were black-owned real estate companies, banks, restaurants, nightclubs.”
Today, as former Commissioner Marion Williams often noted, it’s hard to find a place on Laney Walker to sit down and have a cup of coffee.
That’s part of the reason why Pike and the Savannah Diocese came to the realization that Immaculate Conception could continue its mission even if it moved.
“The bishop was hesitant,” Pike said, “but demographics have changed.”
When Immaculate Conception School was founded, it served children within walking distance. Now, the neighborhood has declined. Many of the businesses nearby are vacant.
And students come to the school from all parts of Richmond, Columbia and Aiken counties.
Only one child walks to school.
The move crosses lines that have divided the city in many ways, however. The school’s new home will be the parish building of Most Holy Trinity Church, 811 Telfair St. That’s only eight or nine blocks from the current school, but it’s on the other side of the railroad tracks. It will no longer be located in the historically African-American community.
Pike doesn’t expect that to dramatically change the student mix in the school, but he recognizes that it will have an impact. “The idea is that we want to reach out to a broader constituency. We don’t want to only be representative of this Laney Walker neighborhood. We want to allow all people to reach out and find a better environment for education.”
The new building at Most Holy Trinity will require some remodeling, with a fire-sprinkler system being the big-ticket item. But Pike said the three-story structure will have more than enough space for classrooms.
Pike’s five-year plan, which he drew up with the help of Assistant Principal Ed Belinski and others in the school, calls for increased enrollment, some reductions in spending and a slow increase in tuition.
“For the last five years, the school has operated on huge deficit budgets, depending on donations and loans to make it year to year, to pay the salaries and the light bill.”
Next year, tuition will go up to $3,200 per year. At the end of five years, it may be as much as $4,500 per student. However, he anticipates that will remain only half what many other Catholic schools charge.
“We are going to serve what I hope is going to be a niche for working-class parents who want to be able to send their children to private school.”
As Father Fortunate told the eighth graders at Immaculate Conception, small sacrifices — like Simon made when he carried the cross for Jesus — can lead to big changes. In Principal Pike’s mind, the extra sacrifice that some parents will be asked to make next year — that extra $400 to send a child to Immaculate Conception — will lead to big changes at the school.
“As the program expands, in our five-year plan, we’ll bring back the comprehensive program this school was once renowned for,” Pike said. “There will be added college prep specialties, liberal arts, foreign language, technology.”
But the financial support must come from parents, Pike said. “There is a diocese subsidy, but it’s very small in the overall budget.”
Next year, according to Pike’s plan, enrollment will grow by about 30 students. This spring, the school will begin advertising for new enrollment.
And what they’ll be advertising is a religious educational environment — a Christian school.
“Our cornerstone is the teaching of Jesus,” Pike said. “Those morals and values can’t be set by any better example.”
After years in the public schools, where he was deeply dissatisfied with the ethical and moral environment, he sees Immaculate Conception as an opportunity to bring children the most important lessons — the same lessons that nuns brought children for nearly a century.
Those lessons are now taught by lay teachers, but faith remains the foundation.
“Good education has to have a good environment,” Pike said. “The thing holding us back from a good environment in public schools, especially Richmond County, is that sense of moral values.”
“I know, as a parent, I’d rather have my children grow up with good morals and values instead of being magna cum laude.” | |
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