Reading, Writing, Resume

Come fall, the students at Verbum Dei High School in Watts not only will attend it, they will spend at least one day a week trying to save it.

The Roman Catholic all-boys college-prep campus is struggling with low enrollment because many families in its nearby communities cannot afford even its modest tuition. So, in a radical effort, all the Verbum Dei students will work part time in corporations that will, in return, pay much of their tuition.

The change at Verbum Dei is patterned after a novel high school started six years ago by Jesuits in one of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods. It marks the first attempt in the nation to convert an existing Catholic school completely to a work-study institution, Catholic education officials say. The Los Angeles effort, they add, is being closely watched as a possible solution for other urban schools across the country with similar problems.

For generations, urban Catholic schools have provided a leg up to the children of families striving for a better life. Those parochial schools’ high academic standards, strict discipline and individual attention, coupled with relatively low, church-subsidized tuitions, offer an attractive alternative to the overcrowded, underachieving, gang-plagued public schools in some urban neighborhoods.

The Verbum Dei effort, though undertaken primarily to save the school, comes with an important side benefit: It is expected to give its students, all African Americans or Latinos, an unusual amount of experience and contacts in the business world.

“I think it’s a great opportunity for us. It’s going to show us how the real world is,” said Fredrick Gordon, 15, of Verbum Dei’s upcoming Corporate Work-Study Program. Fredrick, a sophomore, and some schoolmates recently toured the high-rise offices of Aon Corp., a large insurance broker that has signed on with the program.

The employers will provide a full-time, entry-level clerical job that will be shared by four students, each working a different day of the week, a total of five days per month. Their collective $25,000 salary for the school year will be paid to the school to cover about 70% of the $8,800-per-student cost of one year of schooling for the foursome. The annual tuition and fees are now $3,700, and two-thirds of the families receive financial aid. With the work-study program, tuition and fees will drop to $2,200 per student, and scholarships will continue for families who need them.

“We knew we had to address the problem of the unaffordability of education in urban areas,” said Father William Wood, who was named Verbum Dei’s president two years ago. After studying various options, the school decided to “move from a financing system that is tuition-driven to one that is job-driven.”

But that means other changes as well. The school day will be lengthened and course schedules rearranged so students do not miss out on class time while they are on the job. The fabled sports program will be altered too.

Since its 1962 founding, Verbum Dei--”Word of God” in Latin--has groomed ninth- through 12th-graders from some of Los Angeles’ meanest streets for college. Its tidy, low-slung campus, built around a chapel and flower-filled courtyards, faces Central Avenue, just a few blocks south of the flash point of the 1965 Watts riots. Behind it sprawls the notorious Nickerson Gardens public housing project.

Sixty-two percent of its students are African American, and the other 38% are Latino; fewer than half are Catholic, and the majority of families live below the federally defined poverty level. Most of the students go on to college.

“The Verb,” as it has long been nicknamed, has increasingly required financial help from the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, which operates the school. Built for 400 students, the campus had an enrollment dip to 163 students in the fall of 2000. Reductions in course offerings and other painful cuts were eroding the academic program.

That year, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony asked the Jesuits, who run the highly successful Loyola High School west of downtown, to take over Verbum Dei and find a way to save it.

Many urban-core Catholic schools across the country have closed in the last two decades as their upwardly mobile families moved to the suburbs. Traditional ways to keep the doors open for poor families--hefty archdiocesan tuition subsidies, fund-raising drives and donations from foundations--were not enough in those cases, said Jeffrey D. Thielman. He is executive director of the Cassin Educational Initiative Foundation, which was started two years ago to help establish work-study Catholic schools across the country.

Thielman said the work-study model is not only a financial solution but one that benefits student in other ways.

“Work-study provides an opportunity for a young person to earn his or her college-prep school education while getting a tremendous amount of exposure to the world of law, banking, finance. And it makes sense from a business point of view because it provides talented workers for entry-level clerical jobs, where there is a great need and a high turnover,” Thielman said.

The program had its roots in the early 1990s in Chicago, when then-Cardinal Joseph Bernardin asked the local priests of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), known for its excellent schools and universities around the world, to better serve the largely poor, Mexican immigrant neighborhoods of Pilsen and Little Village on the city’s southwest side.

They devised the work-study program to open Cristo Rey Jesuit High School, the first new Catholic high school in the city in more than three decades.

It started in 1996 with fewer than 100 students, all dropouts or transfers from public schools, and 15 corporate sponsors. Today it is nearing its 500-student maximum, sending most to college, and has 110 firms on board.

“Sending a 14- or 15-year-old into an adult world five days a month does wonders,” said Dan O’Brien, a workplace coordinator at Cristo Rey (Spanish for “Christ the King”) and liaison for other schools that want to follow the Chicago example, including Verbum Dei.

“The interaction with adults in the workplace gives our students tremendous poise and confidence,” O’Brien added. “They will be years ahead of the curve, and if they play their cards right, the world is theirs for the taking.”

Modeled on Cristo Rey, a new urban Catholic high school opened last year in Portland, Ore. A needy neighborhood in Austin, Texas, will get a work-study school this fall, and there are plans for another to open in Tucson next year. Similar schools are planned in New York City’s South Bronx, Boston, Cleveland, Denver and Waukegan/North Chicago.

In addition to lining up corporations, Verbum Dei officials have been preparing students for their new duties--including answering phones, filing, copying, faxing, word processing and other computer work--by busing them once a week after school to the PUENTE Learning Center, a Catholic job training and literacy program near downtown.

Verbum Dei is developing a new “block” schedule to ensure that students cover all their classwork, and it will provide transportation to the jobs. Returning students will start the school year early, Aug. 19, and incoming freshmen must attend a summer session to prepare them for the workplace.

At the school long known as a sports powerhouse, especially in basketball, athletes will be required to miss team practices--and games--that fall on their workdays. And, in perhaps the most vivid example of change, officials suspended the football program for the coming school year while the work-study program launches.

“We had to get our staff on board, and our families. It was our kids that helped sell it,” said Principal Benjamin Callaway, a lay Catholic whom the Jesuits coaxed out of retirement after a 37-year career in the Detroit public schools.

English teacher Margaret Triplett, who came to Verbum Dei eight years ago after the closure of the Catholic girls school where she had been working, said she embraced the new program at first as a way to save the school but now believes it will also “be really good for our students.”

“I think it will really energize them and give them a chance to show what they can do,” Triplett said.

Rosa Guerrero of Watts said she was overjoyed to learn about the work-study program because it enables her to send her son, Jorge Andara, 16, back to Verbum Dei this fall for his senior year. He spent his first two years of high school there, but the single mother said that, even with a partial scholarship, she could not afford to keep him there on her $12,000-a-year earnings as an inventory clerk. Jorge is completing his junior year at Jordan, a large public high school nearby.

“He is a very good boy, but he started to get in with the wrong crowd, and his grades dropped,” she said. Guerrero said she has been saving all she can to send Jorge and his brother Danny Andara, 15, who will be a freshman, to Verbum Dei this fall.

“It’s very important to me for them to get a good education. I didn’t have that chance, and I know how hard it is to get along without it,” Guerrero said. Best of all, she added, her sons “will feel good because they are working for it.”

The task of finding firms to hire the students has fallen to Father Scott Santarosa, the school’s director of development, and to Jeff Bonino-Britsch, who previously worked on social justice programs for the archdiocese.

They opened their thick Rolodexes and started with people long active in other Catholic school and archdiocesan causes.

Enthusiasm From Corporate World

Michael L. McRoskey, senior vice president for corporate services at CB Richard Ellis Inc., said his realty firm leaped at the chance to provide a job for Verbum Dei students.

“So many times you get asked to donate dollars and don’t know where they go; you don’t get to see the fruits of your donation,” said McRoskey, a Loyola High alumnus and a past board member for a Catholic girls school. “But here you get a chance to interact with bright, well-trained young men and be a part of their lives and their futures. It’s much more personal, and that makes it all the more rewarding.”

Some Verbum Dei families, uncomfortable with the changes, have decided to send their sons elsewhere this fall, and enrollment is expected to drop below 150. Officials, however, expect the enrollment to start climbing strongly if the work-study program proves successful.

Kevin Comeaux Sr., whose son Kevin Jr., 15, is a freshman, said preparing for the work-study program “already has given Kevin a lot of confidence.”

“It’s going to be a big adjustment for everybody, but this school is very good at working closely with the students to help them do their best, and it’s going to be worth it,” Comeaux said.

Many of Verbum Dei’s students said they hope the program will lead to summer jobs and help them find mentors.

Sophomore Andre Okoreeh, 15, said he was “a little worried at first. I was afraid it would interfere with my schoolwork, and I am in a lot of school activities that I don’t want to give up.”

But his recent tour of Aon Corp. helped.

“I’d never been to an office like that, and I loved it. So now, while I still have some concerns, I am willing to give it a chance. I think it will help me get into college,” Andre said.