New School at Mission Gets Blessing

VENTURA — When Cardinal Roger Mahony came to town Sunday and blessed the San Buenaventura Mission’s Holy Cross School, Sherrie Pacheco could tell the difference.

What was once just an empty building is now a place for the community.

“I feel like the school has a glow,” said the mother of three school students. “This was a spiritual moment.”

Mahony, the archbishop of Los Angeles, stood atop the steep steps of the 217-year-old mission’s newest building surrounded by dozens of parishioners, representatives of a Native American group and a cadre of visiting priests.

He blessed the 40,000-square-foot building that has been about four years in the making, sprinkling holy water among the halls where students will be studying today for the first time, and prayed that the “word of God would always echo from its walls.”

Controversy about the building project has dissipated since church officials clashed with archeologists and activists, who demanded that the school seek another spot to build once the church broke ground in September 1997. As a compromise, the new structure has been built partially on stilts to protect ancient artifacts--what is left of a long-ago trash heap from when Chumash and Westerners first met.

Rather than building the school’s foundation into the ground, a grid of concrete beams rests on concrete caissons anchored in bedrock. Three feet of sand fills the grid to preserve the ruins, so that archeologists could potential study the site later.

It looks propped up by a climb of concrete steps that seem to push the building skyward.

“We all know the history. That’s history,” said Msgr. Patrick O’Brien, the parish’s priest. “We’re moving forward.”

The church invited a Native American group, which played drums and sang a song of strength at the building’s dedication.

“We’re here for all Indian people,” said John Rutherford of Ventura, a native of the Wampanoag, which settled on the East Coast. “The church has handled this well. They have tried to accommodate everybody.”

Regina Wilcox, a Chumash descendant from Oxnard, however, was one of those who declined the invitation to the ceremony. She appreciated the offer by the church, she said, but still disagreed with its actions.

“I’m pleased they went to such great lengths,” she said, “but, I’m never going to approve of what they did.”

The $7-million construction project to rebuild the ailing, nearly 80-year-old school--for which the parish has so far raised $4.5 million--has completed only its first phase. Children in kindergarten through fourth grade will attend classes in the new building, until the whole project is finished and all 205 students attend class in one building. This new building will then become a parish office.

The rest of the school is to be built on top of the mission’s original quadrangle, the 200-year-old compound that includes the areas where the mission’s founders ate and slept.

“The children have put up with noise and dirt and dust for four years,” said Dorothy Reed, the school’s principal. “They’ve been asking more and more questions, and getting more and more excited every day.”

The students are looking forward to having more space, they say, and moving their books and papers into their new classrooms--and they’re happy to let the adults do most of the heavy lifting.

But they may miss the friendly fourth-grade ghost, which they say occasionally pokes around the old building, where students in fifth through eighth grades will continue their classes. His name is George, according to Meghan Taylor, 8.

Won’t the new building get some ghostly visits? Not likely, said fourth-grader Meaghan Guagliardo.

“This building is too big,” she said. “They’ll all get lost.”