Pacoima Catholic School to Start $2.1-Million Building

One of the last Catholic schools in the San Fernando Valley to recover from the 1994 Northridge earthquake will break ground next month for a $2.1-million school building.

Mary Immaculate School has been getting by for 2 1/2 years with portable classrooms for kindergarten through eighth-graders from the largely Spanish-speaking community.

The Los Angeles Archdiocese’s engineers spent two years unsuccessfully trying to convince Federal Emergency Management Agency officials that the old school building was more than 50% destroyed and thereby eligible for a major rebuilding grant--instead of money for repairs.

“We came close--49% destroyed,” said Brother Hilarion O’Connor, director of the archdiocese’s construction office.

The parish did not want to repair the school, however, and demolished the building last January.

“The building was not very well constructed and still had damage from the 1971 Sylmar quake,” said Father Tom Rush, the pastor. “Many parents said they didn’t want to send their children back to that school.”

When the Jan. 17 earthquake hit nearly three years ago, Mary Immaculate School was close to capacity with 300 students. In months following, the enrollment dropped by a third. The school might have lost that semester entirely had not St. Ferdinand’s parish in San Fernando absorbed most of the Mary Immaculate students temporarily at its school.

Four months later, the Pacoima parish bought portable classrooms with FEMA money, and has gradually climbed back in enrollment to about 250 students.

Meanwhile, Mary Immaculate Church itself was damaged by the earthquake and parishioners did not return to its permanent worship facility until Easter 1995. Located one block east of the Golden State Freeway on Van Nuys Boulevard, the parish served by Rush and other priests had 1,500 parishioners coming to weekend Masses prior to the temblor.

After being evicted by the quake, the church first held services in a social hall with a capacity of only 300, then in a large white tent in the church parking lot.

That tent now serves as a temporary athletic facility for Alemany High School, the only other Catholic school in the Valley that still has not completely recovered from the quake.

The quake closed Alemany’s campus on Rinaldi Street in Mission Hills. But the coed school was able first to share nearby Queen of Angels High School Seminary adjacent to the San Fernando Mission, then take over the campus when the seminary was closed.

“The next steps at Alemany are to remodel the old dorms to replace 32 temporary classrooms and build a new gymnasium,” said O’Connor, the archdiocese construction director.

Once new construction is finished at Alemany High and Mary Immaculate School, he said, Catholic schools in the Valley will have put the Northridge quake behind them.

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Officials concede that earthquake damage presented opportunities to religious institutions, including the Pacoima parish, to upgrade facilities.

About $300,000 raised by Mary Immaculate parish will be used to renovate the church building--everything from better air conditioning to relocating the altar and making other internal changes to reflect current Catholic thinking on church design. Similar liturgy-related design changes have been made in other renovated Catholic churches in the Valley.

The $2.1 million designated for building a new school, including $1.3 million in insurance money, will provide a more modern building, said Mary Immaculate Principal Kathleen Damisch.

“We will be adding a computer lab with a floor that can be reconfigured as technology changes,” Damisch said. “The other additions are a science lab and small bathrooms off each of the three primary grade classrooms.”

One-third of all Mary Immaculate students have a part of their tuition paid by the archdiocese, she said. Yearly tuition is $1,870 for one child whose parents are parish members; $2,750 for a child of nonmembers. The amounts are lower when a family has more than one child attending.

“The amount of the subsidy is based on family income and archdiocese guidelines,” Damisch said. “We also try to help families that don’t exactly meet the guidelines.”

In planning groundbreaking ceremonies for the new school building, school leaders picked Jan. 6--which Christians celebrate as Epiphany, commemorating Jesus’ baptism.

If parish officials had wanted to exorcise their frustration over the long wait for a new school as well as make an ironical statement, they could have delayed the groundbreaking until Jan. 17--the anniversary of the quake.

“We decided to stay away from that,” the principal said. “We wanted to make a religious focus on the theme of light and hope that is part of Epiphany.”