O.C.’s Mater Dei High Has Big Reputation, Even Bigger Ambition

Tuition is $3,200 a year. It takes high entrance exam scores to get in, although family connections help. Some years, as many as 900 qualified applicants have been turned away.

Athletic teams, supported by enthusiastic, generous alumni, have national reputations. Baseball and basketball teams have been ranked No. 1 in the nation. Despite complaints about recruiting violations, the athletic department never has received more than a one-year, wrist-slap probation.

The school’s top administrator has hired professional fund-raisers and says he is “very confident” about raising $15 million for new buildings and an endowment fund.

Not bad for a medium-size college.

But this is a high school--Mater Dei in Santa Ana. It is one of the biggest Catholic secondary schools in the nation and the biggest west of Chicago.

At age 40, the 18-acre campus is bursting with more than 2,100 boys and girls.

It is also bursting its buttons at the moment over its basketball team, which is playing tonight in Oakland for the state championship, to the surprise of hardly anyone. The team has won the state title before--as recently as 1987.

Perhaps as remarkable, about 3,000 Mater Dei rooters are expected to make the 450-mile trip to see the game. In a sample of one Mater Dei classroom this week, 19 of 22 students said they would attend.

“Sports are put on a pedestal here. Everything is centered around sports,” said Chris Heiser, a 16-year-old student.

And who’s responsible for that? “We are,” answered the class, almost in unison.

“It’s easier to get involved here than at a lot of other schools,” Becky Berardini, 17, said. “Mater Dei is really competitive. The desire to succeed is really something that keeps you going. It just keeps you motivated.”

School officials say the quality and enthusiasm of their students is evident in areas other than athletics.

Honors-class enrollment tops 1,200. About 95% of the graduating seniors go directly to universities and to four- and two-year colleges. Mater Dei students consistently score higher than average on the SAT college entrance exams. Last year the school’s combined average score was 1,010 points, compared to 906 statewide.

University of California admissions director Ed Apodaca said Mater Dei is a familiar name in his office. The campus is one of the state’s major sources of UC students, “probably in the top 10%” statewide. “They should be very proud of the number of students they send us,” Apodaca said.

They are, and they do it while providing fewer teachers per student than the typical Orange County public high school. At Mater Dei, there is on the average of one teacher for each 35 students. By contrast, in Fullerton and Huntington Beach high schools, the average is about one to 28.

“Our ratio might be a little higher, but the quality of our students and teachers kind of compensates,” said Mater Dei’s principal, Father John B. Weling.

Public school educators say the reason for Mater Dei’s high academic performance is the same as for its athletic superiority: The school can pick and choose its students from all of Orange County because, unlike public schools, it is not restricted by residency requirements. A scholar from La Habra or an athlete from San Clemente need not move to Santa Ana to attend Mater Dei.

In the case of academics, Mater Dei selects the cream of college-bound students whose families can afford the substantial tuition. The school promises parents a “holistic” education for their children stressing not only academic instruction but spiritual training and strict discipline.

Besides taking the usual college-prep curriculum, Mater Dei students must take 40 units of religious studies spread throughout their four high school years and perform at least 80 hours of “community service,” such as helping at hospitals and visiting the elderly.

Four deans are assigned full time to discipline and spend much of it enforcing a strict and detailed dress code. The code’s small type covers most of two pages in the student handbook, specifying dress for virtually every occasion from classroom to football games to banquets to the prom.

The aim is clearly stated: to avoid “exaggerated or faddish” appearances that “draw unfavorable attention to the wearer.” Students are reminded that “attending Mater Dei is a privilege.”

The overall result has been a bright, obedient student body and a corps of success-oriented parents who have the means and desire to help with the hundreds of extras, like bus fare for the debate team or sheet music for the choir.

Or support for winning teams. Mater Dei can give breaks to great quarterbacks, forwards and pitchers, attracting them from both Catholic and public schools with the promise of high-profile athletic programs sure to attract college scouts. In basketball alone, 19 Mater Dei players have gone directly to major college teams in the past seven years.

A few scholarships are available to help promising students who could not otherwise enroll.

These attractions have proved to be substantial. In 1984, for example, when the Mater Dei Monarchs were arguably the best basketball team in Orange County history, four of the five starters were not Catholic and came from as far away as Cerritos. In 1987, a quarterback from Corona del Mar High School transferred to Mater Dei, and interscholastic sports authorities put Mater Dei on one year’s probation for alleged recruiting irregularities--a misunderstanding, according to Weling.

Criticism from rival basketball coaches was unusually harsh and open in the mid ‘80s, when Mater Dei Coach (and now also athletic director) Gary McKnight had some of the best teams ever and set them to running up lopsided scores of 103-46, 91-37 and 92-31.

Some charged McKnight cared only about his team’s ranking in polls. An athletic director at a Los Angeles Catholic high school published a letter questioning McKnight’s “responsibility as a Christian educator.

“After all,” wrote Bob Fish of Cathedral High School, “where is the compassion for the other team?”

A few years later, McKnight said his youth (he was in his late 20s) had made him overzealous. He had mellowed since then, he said. On the other hand, the enthusiasm of and for his teams has hardly abated.

The intensity of students and boosters is remarkable for the high school level. An extraordinarily large pep squad, sometime practicing longer hours than sports teams, has won national championships. They and rooters travel great distances for away games, throw tailgate parties, buy and wear “Monarch Mania” T-shirts.

Those willing to write checks as well as cheer have formed the Quarterback Club. Consequently, players have the best of equipment and uniforms, and the baseball field got the first electronic scoreboard on an Orange County high school diamond, a gift of alumnus and then-New York Yankees shortstop Bobby Meacham.

“It’s almost like a college situation,” McKnight said.

Game crowds are so large and the campus so cramped, however, that Mater Dei plays few of its home games at home. Virtually all of the school’s departments are aching for space. Mater Dei officials are hoping that the past generosity of sports boosters signals smooth sailing for a building-fund campaign.

“I don’t think it’s going to hurt--put it that way,” Weling said.

Opened in 1950 as part of the Southern California postwar boom in Catholic education, Mater Dei was designed for a student enrollment of only about 800.

It was the only coeducational Catholic high school in Orange County, and applications soon began to rise. The enrollment began its steep climb in 1956 and by 1964 had jumped to 1,800.

Mater Dei was refusing as many as 900 applicants each year until 1987, when the county’s second Catholic co-ed high school, Santa Margarita, opened in Rancho Santa Margarita and relieved some of the pressure. With an enrollment holding at about 2,100, Mater Dei now turns away about 200 applicants a year.

In the meantime, a former bank building was acquired and temporary classrooms were brought in. More affluent students meant more cars to park. Students’ cars line neighborhood streets and cover the outdoors basketball courts, which must be cleared by the time ROTC drill begins.

There are two lunch periods so that only 1,000 students at a time cram the “lunchroom,” merely row after row of outdoor benches. If it’s raining, the diners take over the gym.

Fund raising to relieve Mater Dei’s crowding was postponed while the diocese concentrated on financing the new Santa Margarita campus.

It was the first campaign to build a new Catholic school in Orange County since the ‘40s and the first new Catholic high school in the nation in a decade. Fund-raisers received a pleasant surprise. Not only did they raise the required $26 million, but the three largest contributions, all more than $1 million, came from non-Catholics.

Not surprisingly, Santa Margarita’s subsequent enrollment policies have permitted an unusually high non-Catholic enrollment--about 25%. Mater Dei’s is only about 5%, but consultants say that could change if studies show it would be a fund-raising advantage.

“Successful fund raising promotes more successful fund raising,” said Father Michael Harris, Santa Margarita’s principal and former principal at Mater Dei.

Weling--a Santa Ana native and former Mater Dei student, teacher and freshman football coach--has been principal of Mater Dei for three years. Nearly half the time has been spent trying to figure a solution to the space problem.

Weling said some have suggested moving the campus at Edinger Avenue and Bristol Street because the neighborhood has become increasingly poorer and run-down. But the school’s tradition and his fondness for his hometown Santa Ana make him want to keep the school where it always has been, he said.

Still, if about eight more acres cannot be obtained, staying there would be very difficult, Weling said. The best hope would be obtaining the land as part of possible city-sponsored redevelopment of the area, he said.

Otherwise, the campus might be moved to somewhere close by--preferably within Santa Ana but perhaps in the South Coast Plaza area, Huntington Beach or Tustin.

“We have casually looked around,” Weling said. “Of course, it’s up to the bishop to decide.”

The most telling factor, however, is bound to be money. Weling says he is new to fund raising, but beginning next fall he will dive into it as the school’s new president. Someone else will be hired to succeed him as principal, perhaps a lay person--which would be a first for the school.

Already at work is the Robert B. Sharp Co. of Santa Ana, the fund-raising consultants for the Santa Margarita High School project.

Bob Sharp said his firm will interview the sort of people who make such donations to gauge the feasibility of Mater Dei’s hopes. Surprisingly, Sharp said he doesn’t consider the athletic department’s fund raising and victory record much of an asset.

“Generally speaking, strong (athletics) programs really only yield athletics-fund giving. They have very little effect on building-fund programs,” Sharp said.

“Ironically, we’re seeing some skepticism from major donors when it comes to putting big bucks in athletic programs if some money won’t be available to the school in general,” he said. “There is a real concern now over faculty salaries in Catholic schools,” which at Mater Dei average $6,000 to $10,000 a year below public school levels. Not surprising, part of the fund-raising goal includes endowment funds to increase teacher salaries, according to Weling.

“It gets down to a belief in the ideals and the benefits the institution seeks to provide,” Sharp said. “Every institution is a little bit different. We hope to find that at Mater Dei the alumni have a tremendous love for it, respect for it.”

Weling is optimistic. “After 40 years, we have a well-established alumni . . . ,” he said. “We’re just hoping that corporations will help us too.”

Times staff writer Tom Hamilton contributed to this story.