Pooled efforts start new school; 60 chosen pupils gain skills, beat the odds - Mother Seton Academy, Baltimore, Maryland

National Catholic Reporter, Sept 5, 1997 by Patricia Lefevere

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 and enrollment of 60 sixth-, seventh- and eight-graders. Many pupils enter with second-grade level reading and writing skills. When they graduate three years later, all are at eight-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 disadvantages 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 student's different religious traditions, said Bader.

Bader, the school's principal, said teachers try to involves students in various prayer experiences. Classroom prayer occurs and so does the celebration of the Jewish Seder meal and the Africa-American festival of Kwanza.