Saturday, December 13, 1997

Jesuit elementary school signals hope in slums

By TOM RAGAN / Associated Press Writer

PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- To get into Gesu School, students must be buzzed through a pair of steel doors, then get past "Miss John," the school's nurse, counselor and security guard.

Outside the red-brick Catholic elementary school in impoverished North Philadelphia, graffiti is scrawled on abandoned buildings. Drug dealing is a way of life. Some schoolchildren have witnessed shootings. Others have fathers in prison. Badlands, they call the neighborhood.

Gesu offers hope.

Even though half of the 415 students are raised by single parents, usually mothers and grandmothers, the students rise above their broken homes and dismal surroundings to test above the national average in both reading and math.

Ninety-five percent of the students graduate from high school. Two out of three attend college, school officials say.

"Failure," says the school motto, "is not an option."

The 130-year-old school itself has followed that dictum. In 1993, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia closed the parish because there weren't enough Catholics to fill its pews. The school was next, but a few individuals saved it by raising $4 million over four years.

"We became enamored with the kids in their uniforms, the sense of mission, the safe haven that is served, the values systems and the test scores," said Peter Miller, 33, an investment consultant who introduced dozens of clients to the school.

"So we got behind it and supported it," he said.

The threat came as the Archdiocese was consolidating several North Philadelphia parishes because of a 50 percent decline in the Catholic population in the area since 1970, said Marie Kelly, archdiocese spokeswoman.

"There were fewer and fewer Catholics and a lot of large churches. So the cost to keeping the empty parishes open wasn't a reasonable way to use our resources," she said.

The neighborhood had changed since Jesuit priests built the school in 1868 and named it after Christ ("Gesu" is Italian for Jesus). Italians, Slavics and Irish gave way to blacks, and the Catholics to Baptists and Methodists.

Still, Winston Churchill, who graduated from nearby St. Joseph's Prep, saw a neighborhood he remembered.

Churchill, chairman of the school's board of directors, asked friends to donate to save the school. Protestants, Catholics, Baptists, Jews -- they all pitched in.

"It's just a question of people coming together around a cause that is obviously good and effective," said Churchill.

The Jesuit-run school begins each day by selecting a student to read from the Scriptures. School officials say the teachings don't follow Catholicism so much as they do Christianity in general.

That's because 95 percent of the students are non-denominational and come from Baptist and Methodist families, not Catholic families.

The little school among the slums is so beloved that some single parents work two jobs to pay the $1,500-a-year tuition. Teachers -- half of them black, half white -- stay on, even though they could make more money in the public school system.

"It's hard to get good Catholic school teachers," said Antoinette Lassiter-Morrissey, a 25-year-old kindergarten teacher. "Have you seen our pay scale? A lot of the teachers want to be here."

A product of a low-income housing project, she is drawn here by the connection she feels with the students, who call her "Miss Sparkle."

"We'll joke around," Lassiter-Morrissey said. "They'll say 'What up, Miss Sparkle?' and I'll say 'What up with you? But they also know the magic words: 'Please,' 'Thank you,' and 'May I.' "

The $4 million raised helps keep the annual tuition at $1,500, half of what it costs the school to educate each student.

That is enough for Katie Robinson, who sent five children through Gesu. She cares so much about her school that she will do whatever is necessary to send her four grandchildren there.

"Wash windows, clean toilets, babysit. Whatever it takes," she said. "I come from strong people. My mother and my father dreamed the dream for me to have a good education. And I passed it on to my children."