Heart and Souls

The auditorium windows are opened wide, inviting patches of soft light and cool swirls of evening breeze, as familiar here as the strident wails of sirens and car alarms, and the slow rattle of shopping carts being pushed along 15th Street in Pico-Union.

It is the final performance of “Godspell” at St. Thomas the Apostle School. Borrowed costumes are due back tomorrow, and the school year soon will end. Tonight is one last time for young stars to shine.

Standing in back is Dan Horn, 35, the school’s principal. To Horn, “Godspell” represents a sort of miracle, the kind that anchors educators to their work. This play, Horn says, has changed lives.

Included in the cast are Jorge Gamez, quarterback on the football team, and Adolfo Guevara, who last year was a self-described troublemaker. He didn’t get along with teachers, didn’t study, got in fights.

Adolfo typifies the changes Horn has seen in students through a 2-year-old program at the school called For Young Improvers (FYI), which teaches values such as trust, honesty, respect and teamwork.

That a Catholic school would teach values is not unusual. What is unique about the program is that participants, in grades six through eight, serve as both student and teacher. They are helping each other become leaders and develop problem-solving skills in a neighborhood where bad decisions can get you killed.

And “Godspell,” Horn says, is proof that the program works. More than 50 students auditioned for the play in December. “Before FYI, it wouldn’t have been the cool thing to do, and peer pressure would have kept a lot of them from auditioning,” he says.

“Godspell” also represents something unique about the people drawn to this school, Horn says.

On piano is Mary Ekler, who performs with Little Anthony and the Imperials and whose resume lists work with Helen Reddy, Wilson Phillips and Freda Payne. Ekler is donating her time to the play.

Joseph Walsh, who once performed on Broadway in “Amadeus” and now teaches kindergarten, is the director. There was a moment during rehearsals when Walsh watched Adolfo, in the role of Jesus, stand alone on stage and blossom before his eyes. His words turned into music and it flowed from his heart. For Walsh this confirmed why he became a teacher and why he stayed after school every day for four months to work on the play before heading off to his second job waiting tables.

The choreographer is Colleen O’Shaughnessey, a recent biology graduate from Mount St. Mary’s College. For four years, O’Shaughnessey has been a volunteer dance instructor at St. Thomas. Next year, she will teach fourth grade.

For O’Shaughnessey, there was a similar moment that still brings tears. “A student came up to me and said I was like a second mother to her. It blew me away. I’m 24 years old. I’m not a mother to anyone. For a kid to think that I had such an impact in a positive way, I can’t imagine being anywhere else.”

The student was Maricela Chavez, a seventh-grader who sings two solos in the play. In the audience are her three sisters and mother, Irene Ruiz. They live near the school in a small apartment with no bedrooms.

Ruiz came to Los Angeles as a child from the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico. She has sent all four daughters to St. Thomas for the values that are taught there. The two oldest now are in college. To pay their tuitions, Ruiz sold tamales and corn in front of the church. She made clothes to sell, and now she cleans houses.

Her life has been hard but good, she says. She wishes she could have provided her children with a house, where they would be safe and she could watch them play. Perhaps her dreams were too big, she says, but it will be different for her daughters.

“All the time I have bad jobs,” Ruiz says. “Sweep there, wash this, clean here--the toilets. I say OK because I’m happy with my job because I have nothing, only my arms. I tell my daughters, I no want you to work with your arms. I want you to work with your minds. The world is different for you.”

Their home is small, but it is filled with love, Ruiz says, and as long as her children study hard, the future is filled with promise. Ruiz is one of the many role models--the heroes--who live in the neighborhood.

Ruiz pays careful attention to the play. She doesn’t understand all the words, but as the actors take their final bows, she applauds exuberantly and thumbs away the tears from her cheeks. To see her daughter perform onstage is to see her dreams come true.

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Activities in FYI range from hopping around a circle on one leg and flapping arms like wings of a frantic chicken, to standing in the center of a tight circle and falling backward, trusting that others will break your fall. In the process, students have become more open, more willing to examine and express their feelings, which sometimes run bone-deep.

“My first year here, I had 56 funerals in this church,” says Father Dennis O’Neil, pastor of St. Thomas. “Twenty-seven of them died from bullets.”

The number of violent deaths is now down to about one a month, he says. “Most churches would say that’s awful, but it’s a big improvement for us.”

The collection plate fills with coins and dollar bills during 10 Sunday Masses, all but one said in Spanish. The community is largely first-generation families from Central and South American countries.

The FYI program resulted from need, says Horn, and has nothing to do with the fact that St. Thomas is private, Catholic, inner-city or anything else. He says such programs should be a part of every child’s education.

“All you have to do is open up the paper or turn on the news and see how many young people are involved in serious crime in this country,” he says. “There shouldn’t be a debate. I think it’s very clear that we are in great need of moral development in this country, especially in L.A., where you have children who are killing children. It’s a lack of value for life let alone all the other things like trust and honesty.”

When Horn came to the school in 1990, he set out to fill seven of nine staff positions. But he didn’t build a staff, he built a family. The FYI program serves as the dinner table, where teachers and students can talk easily, where they can laugh and cry together.

“These are our kids,” says Manny Abaunza, who grew up in the neighborhood and now coaches and runs a reading program at the school. “This is our home, and our goal is to do more than prepare them academically. We want to develop character, build human beings with a conscience.”

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A few days before the eighth-graders graduate, the FYI students say goodbye in a program at the church. Adolfo stands at the microphone and tells his younger peers, “Appreciate what you have, and don’t fall to peer pressure.”

Other students have similar messages:

“Stay strong.”

“Appreciate each other.”

“Support one another.”

“Make peace with your enemies.”

Frank Denarde tells fellow students to respect their teachers, trust them and be thankful for them. “Yesterday was just another example that this is a special place,” he says.

Frank, mourning the gunshot death of a friend, turned to his teacher, Vince O’Donoghue, and his classmates. He learned from FYI that it was important to trust friends.

“My teacher is like a father and a friend and a brother,” Frank says. “I was sad yesterday and I started crying. St. Thomas is a special place because when you’re sad, everybody cheers you up.”

FYI turned his life in a new direction, he says. “I used to get in a lot of trouble. I didn’t think before I did something. Now I know that even though we’re in a bad neighborhood and there’s a bunch of gang members and violence and a lot of people who think we’re going to end up just like them, we can be something important and special in life.”

For members of the St. Thomas staff, saying goodbye to students is easier now because of FYI.

“I definitely feel that,” O’Donoghue says. “When they get out there, they need more than book smarts. They have to have a basis of values and beliefs to be prepared for what they’re going to face. We feel confident they are ready to deal with those tests.”

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Silvia Montenegro taught medieval history at the Catholic University of Santa Fe in Argentina before coming to the United States in 1987. At St. Thomas, she started out teaching kindergarten and now teaches sixth grade.

She says it is up to the students to stop the cycles that grip many of them.

“Their sisters and brothers, they’ve been shot. They’ve lost uncles, their sister is pregnant and already has two kids on welfare. Those are the things that are around them every single day, so we want them to take on leadership and find a solution. We’re not going to give them the solutions, we give them tools so they can find them on their own.”

Horn says the next major step for the program is to draw parents into FYI to build stronger families, a stronger community. He also is hopeful funds can be raised to convert a building on the grounds to classrooms, allowing the school to double its enrollment of 315. Scholarship money also is being sought to make the school more affordable. All but four families receive financial aid provided by the archdiocese to help pay the $1,976 tuition.

“We say we serve the poor and in a sense we do,” Horn says. “But it’s not really the poorest of the poor, people who can’t even think about paying a registration or monthly tuition or even the $20 testing fee.”

In 1993, President Clinton designated the school a National Blue Ribbon School of Excellence. Two faculty members have been honored as teachers of the year by the Education Consortium of Central Los Angeles. In 1995, Walsh, the director of “Godspell,” received a national award for first-year teachers.

A giant blue ribbon painted on the building overlooks an asphalt playground. Next door at Normandie Park, homeboys shoot hoops and homeless people sleep in the cool shade. Children toss baseballs. You can hear them laugh above the sounds of sirens.