COLUMN ONE : Providing a Passage to America : In a crumbling Bronx neighborhood, two schools readied immigrant children for the world outside. An alumnus returns to find changes, but the old values.

My old neighborhood in the Highbridge section of the Bronx is poorer and more threatening now than it was 40 years ago, when I grew up here. As children played at recess recently, police forced open the trunk of a car parked near Sacred Heart School and found a woman bound and gagged but alive.

Despite its grim environment, however, the role of Sacred Heart, my alma mater, remains the same: To educate the children of immigrants, or those of people who have yet to share the benefits of American society.

Brother Stephen Schlitte, current principal of Sacred Heart middle school--fifth grade through eighth grade--puts it poetically: “We provide a passage to America.”

About a mile’s walk from Sacred Heart, past Yankee Stadium and the Bronx County Courthouse that was featured in Tom Wolfe’s recent bestseller, “Bonfire of the Vanities,” stands Cardinal Hayes High School, looking clean and orderly in a blighted plain where crack dealers and their clients have taken over apartment buildings and displaced working people.

Monsignor Thomas McCormack, until recently the principal, had three cars stolen from in front of the school. Yet inside, halls are as unmarked and classrooms as industrious as they were 35 years ago when I was one of 800 graduates of the school named for Patrick Cardinal Hayes, an archibishop of New York known for charitable work.

Then, Cardinal Hayes High took in 1,000 boys a year, sons of poor, Catholic parents--largely Irish and Italian, some black and Puerto Rican--and educated them with demanding academics and forceful discipline. Standards were tough--more than 20% flunked out or left each year--but tuition was low: $10 a month if your parents could afford it, $5 or even nothing if they couldn’t.

Today, the school takes in 330 students a year--two-thirds of Puerto Rican background, one-third black, a few Asians and Caucasians. About 16% flunk out or leave. Tuition is now $170 a month, which holds down enrollment but also testifies to the determination of the low-income parents who pay to send their sons to Cardinal Hayes High. (Or their daughters to all-girl Cathedral High in Manhattan).

“The differences between your day and today are accidental,” McCormack said, “but the substance is the same.” Race and background are different, he was saying, but the values are unchanged.

I had come back to Highbridge to see the environmental changes that had occurred since I left in the early 1960s. But I hadn’t come to see physical changes; actually, the area looks a little better than it did a few years ago, when waves of arson attacks had made Highbridge and all of the South Bronx a national symbol of urban destruction and decay. Some buildings have been restored; patches of green and even vegetable plots have replaced buildings that were burned out and then demolished.

I came to see if children of the new people, from Puerto Rico, the British West Indies, the Dominican Republic and the American South, were making the same passage as children of earlier immigrants from other places had made from that neighborhood 40 years ago.

Happily, I found that, at least in the schools I had attended, children are doing just that--with help these days from concerned citizens.

Charitable contributions help about one in five Cardinal Hayes students meet tuition, either because their parents can’t afford the full amount--and the archdiocese can no longer pick up the tab--or because they are part of an effort to rescue dropouts from the public schools, which are in decay.

Forty years ago, things were easier. Then the Grand Concourse--the boulevard that runs in front of Cardinal Hayes High--was the tree-lined “Park Avenue” of the middle-class Bronx. Strong, spacious apartment buildings lined its four-lane expanse. The New York Yankees and visiting teams stayed at the Concourse Plaza Hotel--today a drug-ridden, dilapidated shelter for the homeless.

West of Yankee Stadium in Highbridge, Irish workmen making $96 a week could house their families in five-room, rent-controlled apartments for $42 a month. It was a neighborhood of grocery clerks and warehousemen, subway conductors and motormen, policemen, firefighters and bartenders. Its idea of a rich man was Tom Thompson, a Swedish dock construction worker who got plenty of overtime in World War II.

The neighborhood, built on rising land along the banks of the Harlem River, was a place of some leafy beauty; it was named for a scenic, wrought-iron footbridge over the Harlem that was built in the 1830s by Irish laborers, who later built the New York Central Railroad.

The bridge, a registered landmark, is still there, and so are some of the buildings that qualified for inclusion in guidebooks of the American Institute of Architects. But few of the Irish working people in the 1940s knew about architecture, or any of the other arts.

They had come with little formal education from small farms and towns in the west of Ireland, and they were happy to have work. They were between two worlds--their temporal lives hitched to the economy of the New York metropolitan area, while their emotional lives remained back in Ireland, which they always called “home.”

But their spiritual lives, and most important, the guidance of their children, were cared for by Sacred Heart Church, which comforted the old and taught the young.

Its school took their children, corrected the Irish brogues they brought from home, and taught them of a new country and a wider world. It taught them the value of their individual lives: “You are a temple of the Holy Ghost,” Sister Jane Frances would say, “You are responsible for yourself and others.”

It protected them in practical ways. If a young man stole a car, the police didn’t book him but telephoned the pastor of Sacred Heart, then Monsignor William Humphrey, who inevitably would “know the boy’s parents.”

Humphrey would then ask the car’s owner--probably a non-Catholic--not to press charges, assuring him that the car would be restored and any damages paid. The church would pony up the money, the parents would pay it back, the boy would work it off--a police record was avoided, a productive life, perhaps, saved.

But Highbridge was a one-generation, transitional community even then. The young people didn’t think of taking apartments where their parents lived. They were confident of moving on and moving up. America enjoyed postwar prosperity; there was generally work for the fathers, and often the mothers, too. And with a high school education, the children could get decent office jobs in Manhattan.

Or go further in their education and American life--as many did, in religion (Bishop Emerson J. Moore of New York), in law (New York Judge Lawrence Tonetti), in business (entrepreneur Manuel Villafana, who founded four companies including St. Jude Medical in St. Paul, Minn.) and show business (director Martin Scorsese and actor Richard Mulligan).

But there is less opportunity today, says former Rep. Robert Garcia (D-N.Y.), a long-time congressman for the South Bronx whose parents had emigrated from Puerto Rico. Unemployment among residents of my old neighborhood is chronic; Garcia’s congressional district is among the poorest in the United States.

Garcia, who was recently sentenced to three years in prison for extorting bribes in the Wedtech scandal, says that worse than unemployment, “there is a loss of the self-esteem that was here in the 1940s and 50s.”

One reason it is worse is crack. Even in the 1960s, when heroin was the local curse, it was not as bad, Garcia says. Local gangsters in the past were adult, rich and glamorous, maybe, but remote from kids. Today, the crack dealer is another kid, and that makes the peer pressure intense. “A kid with a BMW or a Jeep Cherokee makes other kids say: ‘Why don’t I try that?’ ” Garcia said.

Others also see the malaise. “I sometimes think the neighborhood is affected by a generalized depression; people sighing: ‘Nothing we can do, nothing we can do,’ ” said Brother Stephen of Sacred Heart, a 37-year-old member of the Marist order who grew up in the northwest Bronx.

Today, the most active support agency in the neighborhood is the Highbridge Life Community Center run by nuns and brothers, who among other things administer AIDS counseling to combat the new terror among the drug-using poor.

It’s in that atmosphere that the schools operate, which makes it all the more remarkable that they succeed.

Today, 815 children are enrolled at Sacred Heart School--almost 40% of them non-Catholic. During my youth, nearby Public Schools 11 and 73 did for the Jewish children of Highbridge what the parochial schools did for the Catholics. But today’s parents are afraid to send their children to the public schools because of drugs, violence and bad companions.

Instead, the minister of the Mt. Zion Baptist Church, which occupies premises that were formerly a synagogue, sends his daughter to Sacred Heart--despite the fact that all students take Catholic religion classes.

Employees of the New York City government that runs the public schools plead to get their children into Sacred Heart--which now has a waiting list despite stiff tuition of $105 a month. Why?

“Values are stressed here, respect is important,” said Sister Danielle Durante, principal of the primary school--kindergarten through fourth-grade classes. “These are tough kids, and sometimes the home life is terrible,” she said. “But we teach them to respect themselves and to get along with others. The kids love to come to school.”

The values, in other words, have not changed in four decades, nor essentially have the children. For a recent visitor to their classroom, fifth graders volunteered that they liked penmanship, the class play, track meets and spelling bees best--which with variations would have been the choices of fifth graders in 1949.

And the academic results are about the same--or even somewhat better, thanks to helping hands from the big world outside.

Los Angeles lawyer-businessman Richard Riordan--who grew up in the New York suburb of New Rochelle--has donated a computer-aided reading program to Sacred Heart and 15 other schools in the New York area (and to 200 schools in Los Angeles). Thanks to the computers, “the reading scores in kindergarten and first grade are off the wall,” Sister Danielle said. The children’s reading scores have come up to the top 10% level nationally.

Riordan has also donated 24 IBM personal computers to Cardinal Hayes High, and he is not alone. Full tuition is paid for 68 students by the Student/Sponsor Partnership, an educational program begun by Peter M. Flanigan (no relation), chairman of the Dillon Read investment banking firm and one-time aide to President Richard M. Nixon. Other philanthropic efforts pay full or partial tuition for 200 Cardinal Hayes students.

Flanigan, a blunt man, says he got involved in helping kids when he realized the dropout rate for New York’s public high schools was 66% or more--”only one kid in three or four finishes.”

The Catholic school system, in New York as elsewhere, had suffered falling enrollment as Caucasian immigrant groups moved away from inner-city neighborhoods, and so had spare classrooms. “So I got the yuppies involved,” Flanigan said.

He asked young investment bankers and lawyers to put up tuition and to sponsor a youngster at a Catholic high school--checking on his or her progress and giving friendship and guidance as warranted.

“I offered them a chance to take a child who really has nothing, no benefits of this productive society, and give him or her an opportunity to participate in the American dream,” Flanigan said.

Last semester, Student/Sponsor Partnership had 400 volunteers placing public school dropout students, many with marginal academic records and troubled home lives, in half a dozen Catholic high schools--two for girls, four for boys.

One of the chief beneficiaries of the program is Cardinal Hayes High, which in one sense has become a prep school for disadvantaged youths. Today, 85% of Cardinal Hayes graduates go on to college--a greater percentage than 35 years ago, when things were easier.

In another sense the school hasn’t changed. The curriculum remains rigorous: four years of English and history, three years of math, foreign language (although Latin, once a general requirement, is now only for honors classes) and religion--even though a third of the students are not Catholic.

“They tell you that you got to work, because if you don’t work you don’t make it,” said Juan Encarnacion, a junior at Cardinal Hayes High.

And the discipline is strict: detention after school for a variety of offenses. The dress code at Cardinal Hayes has not changed in 40 years: ties and jackets, dress trousers and shoes--no sneakers.

“I tell them to make a distinction between the playground and the classroom,” said McCormack, who served as dean of discipline before becoming principal 25 years ago. “Only one Hayes student that I know made a living as a pro athlete--Kevin Loughery (now color commentator for pro basketball’s Atlanta Hawks on WTBS and former coach of the New Jersey Nets and Washington Bullets). But many have made a living because of the academic education they received here.”

It used to be easier. We didn’t need help from concerned citizens when I attended Cardinal Hayes High--tuition was relatively low because the Archdiocese of New York was better able to finance the school, the rest of society provided jobs and opportunity. Nor did we stand out. Far from an elite group, Cardinal Hayes graduates were looked upon as poor but honest street kids.

But today, Cardinal Hayes graduates are special, self-possessed young men who are offered jobs and college assistance by Manhattan’s big banks and corporations--who find them ideal for fulfilling minority-hiring requirements. “When Hayes students return to Sacred Heart for a visit, their dignity is an example for our students,” Brother Stephen said.

They are the hope of the future, says Monsignor McCormack, who recently transferred after 37 years at Cardinal Hayes High to be pastor of a parish in Manhattan. “I am optimistic,” he said. “Change will come, not soon but eventually. In 20 to 25 years the graduates of this place will be in leadership positions. They will make the changes.”

Concentrating on the young and not the old, he is optimistic. And so it is today as it was 40 years ago. Then the old people sat around and spoke of “home”--of fields and farms far from sidewalks and apartments. They had made a new home in the streets of New York, but didn’t know it.

But their children knew it. And the schools gave their children the key to that home, that new land, just as the schools continue to do with other children today. The work goes on. As the Irish say, God bless the work.