A Little Jewel of a School in the Inner City

St. Thomas the Apostle School is a little jewel in a hostile world. In Joe Neeb’s math and science class, for example, there’s no talking back to the teacher. The fifth-graders give obedient, eager answers of “Yes!” when he asks if everybody understands his lessons about decimal points or gravity.

Teachers share funny stories about incidents in class. There’s no talk of strikes here. The campus “guard dog,” a year-old mutt named Chica, happily wanders from classroom to classroom. Visitors learn quickly that they must be on good terms with Chica, or else.

The school was recognized last year by the U.S. Department of Education as a Blue Ribbon School of Excellence. Not only that, but a letter-writing campaign by teachers, administrators and students at the school helped persuade Congress to reinstitute funding for the Blue Ribbon program after initially cutting the budget. The campaign helped convince lawmakers that although the honored schools got no money as a result of the award, it was still important to recognize the efforts at public schools and private campuses like St. Thomas.

“Everybody really loves it here,” said Principal Dan Horn, “the parents, the students, the surrounding community.”

But that’s also the rub about St. Thomas. It’s so much loved that everybody wants to go to this little Catholic school. But they can’t. There’s an enrollment of only 315 and the school has to turn down hundreds of applicants each year. In the current economy, there’s little money available to expand the school’s size.

It’s a little jewel that wants to do more but, for now, can’t.

It’s easy to see why St. Thomas is so popular. It’s located in the Pico-Union area west of downtown, where some of the city’s poorest residents live. There, Salvadoran, Nicaraguan and Mexican immigrants take on two and three jobs to eke out a living. Those who don’t have regular jobs line up along Pico Boulevard, looking for work.

Pico-Union also is a high-crime area. Just a few steps from the neatly kept St. Thomas campus are gang members and drug dealers who do their business in a park.

There are concrete barriers installed along Pico to block traffic because residents grew fearful of drive-by shootings.

Gunfire is a familiar sound on these streets. Though students at nearby Loyola High School--many of whom live outside Pico-Union--are taken aback by the surrounding violence, the kids at St. Thomas are unfazed.

So area parents who want their children to get a good education without the intrusion of drugs, street gangs and poverty come to St. Thomas.

“All I have in this life are my children,” said Rufino Morales, who hopes to get his 5-year-old son, Javier, into St. Thomas, located near Normandie Avenue and 15th Street. “There, he can learn much more than I’ll ever know. I hope he can get in.”

Morales said he has nothing against the public schools in the area. “I’m sure they do a fine job but people around here know that St. Thomas is special,” he explained in Spanish.

Somehow, he’ll manage to scrape up the $1,200 annual tuition.

But the chances are slim that Javier, an active kid with a toothy smile, will make it into St. Thomas. There are only 35 openings for the fall kindergarten class, and school officials expect as many as 300 applications. They are due next month and it’s a time that Principal Horn and other school officials dread.

“Some of the parents beg to get their kids in,” Horn said the other day. “It’s heartbreaking. We want to take a lot more kids in but we can’t.”

Just as the normally bubbly Horn gets depressed thinking about the pending applications for kindergarten, his eyes dart next door to a convent where a handful of nuns live. He doesn’t hide his desire to raise some money to take over the convent and transform it into classrooms, a fully stocked library and other needed school space.

These things take time. And in the meantime, the school must make do with what it has. In the last three years, for example, school officials have required an eight-hour day for kindergartners to ensure that they have adequate time in the classroom. And the once-dormant PTA was reinstituted to give parents a stake in St. Thomas’ affairs.

There are a lot of schools like St. Thomas in Los Angeles. Many of them probably share the same goals and aspirations in an environment as dangerous and impoverished as Pico-Union.

That’s why it is nice to discover little jewels like that in the inner city. The kids at St. Thomas wear sweat shirts that proudly proclaim, “St. Thomas--Simply the best. There’s no doubting about it.”