After a Year, Verbum Dei’s Work-Study Shows Promise

Summer vacation’s arrival at Verbum Dei High School in Watts this month marked the end of an academic year that brought sweeping changes to the all-boys Catholic campus in one of the Los Angeles area’s bleakest neighborhoods.

This was the year Verbum Dei became the first school in the nation to convert to a “corporate work-study” system. Students earned much of their tuition by working one day a week at clerical jobs in law offices, insurance companies and other agencies.

Proponents see the system as a way to make private, high-quality education affordable for disadvantaged students while giving them valuable workplace experience and contacts. They also view the concept as a model for helping financially struggling urban Catholic schools across the country.

At Verbum Dei, school officials say, the work-study program has had a promising first year, despite some concerns from alumni and others that the school’s traditions and sports programs were suffering.

Nearly all of the 36 employers who provided jobs this year have signed on again. Enrollment in the school, which had dwindled to 142 the past school year, is rebounding -- 110 freshmen have been accepted to replace a senior class of only 14, and about 30 more have applied.

Employers are enthusiastic about their young helpers’ work, and students say the program has given them confidence, marketable skills, important connections and mentors.

But a big challenge remains: lining up enough jobs in a sluggish economy.

Challenge of Economy

“This is a key time for us, and the economy isn’t helping,” said Jeff Bonino-Britsch, director of the school’s work-study program. Bonino-Britsch will spend the summer trying to nail down commitments for at least 25 new jobs needed for the students.

The school has tapped its current employers to help recruit new ones. Bonino-Britsch has built a list of 30 to 40 hot prospects and is trying to close some deals.

He said he is confident of getting the jobs by the August opening of school. If not, the freshmen will get job training during the school year until enough work slots can be found for them.

Four students share each full-time, entry-level clerical job, each working a different day of the week. The employer pays the school $25,000 for the 10-month academic year, which covers about 70% of the cost of educating four students. Families or scholarships cover the remaining $2,200, and the school provides free transportation between the campus and the job sites.

If the school reaches the enrollment goal of 400, school officials say, the work-study program will provide the financial base for Verbum Dei to be largely self-sustaining. Until this year, the school needed archdiocese subsidies and outside fund-raising for about 75% of its costs. Officials expect that to drop to about 5%.

“We want our young men to get the most from this opportunity, and we want to be sure our employers feel they are getting good value from their investment in us and their faith in our students,” said Father Scott Santarosa, the school’s development director and part-time math teacher.

Verbum Dei added about an hour and a half to the school day to make up for the time students are on the job. It requires new students to attend a summer session to brush up on computer, math and English skills and to learn to operate fax and copying machines.

“I didn’t want to come here at first, because I didn’t want to go to school longer and get up earlier,” said Reginald Tyler, 16, who entered Verbum Dei two years ago after his plans to attend a Los Angeles public magnet school fell through.

“Now I think it’s a good thing,” said Reginald, who spent Fridays at the downtown law offices of Baker Keener & Nahra. “So many people I know don’t have any goals; they just stay on the streets all day.

“But here I have the experience of knowing what a job is like. I have met people I can go to for advice and help with my future.”

Although students do not get any of the tuition money they earn, some firms give them extra work during school holidays or vacations, and those earnings are theirs to keep.

From its tidy, gated campus on Central Avenue, Verbum Dei has been preparing urban, minority youths for college since its 1962 founding by a prominent African American bishop. All but two members of the Class of 2003 will enter college in the fall; some were accepted at several schools, including the University of California, Notre Dame, USC and Loyola Marymount.

Yet, like many other Catholic schools serving predominantly low-income families, Verbum Dei had struggled for years with declining enrollment and had increasingly depended on archdiocesan subsidies and fund-raising to keep the doors open.

Three years ago, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony asked the local province of Jesuit priests to take over the school for five years and find a way to save it. The priests looked to Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in Chicago, which opened under the work-study model a few years ago. The model has been used to start several other new Catholic high schools in low-income neighborhoods around the country, but no one before Verbum Dei had tried converting an existing campus to such a program.

The Jesuits took two years to plan the conversion and to try to sell the program to parents, students and faculty. That included their controversial decisions to suspend the football program and to forbid students in other sports to miss work for a practice or a game. The decisions upset some alumni and parents, because the school had long been a sports powerhouse, helping students win athletic scholarships to college and even launching some professional sports careers.

But the Jesuits, believing it was important for employers and students to realize that work comes first, stuck to their guns. The varsity basketball team won its division championship this year anyway, but the coach and several parents were angry about players missing some key tournaments.

This fall, the football program will be reinstated with an alumnus as coach, and another alumnus will take over as basketball coach.

The school’s alumni welcomed the sports hirings, along with the earlier selection of alumnus Lonnie Christopher to help coordinate the work-study program.

“A lot of us felt the tradition and spirit were basically gone from the school,” said Harold Edison, Class of 1983.

“We were willing to give the program a chance as a way to keep the school open, but we also wanted to be involved, and we’ve had some rough edges that needed to be smoothed out between the Jesuits and the alumni.”

Edison, a systems analyst for a film studio, said he is “a lot more comfortable and confident” about the school’s future than he was six months ago. He will send his son, Justin, there in the fall.

Father John Weyling, the school’s president, sees the work-study program “as a matter of justice.”

“We are doing our small part here at Verbum Dei to provide an opportunity for our students that many of them most likely would not have had were it not for this school, through no fault of their parents and through no fault of their own,” Weyling said. “It represents much more than just keeping the school from closing.”

Catholic education experts are watching Verbum Dei and other work-study schools in the hope that they can provide answers for other struggling campuses. Two private foundations recently announced grants totaling $18.9 million to start 12 more such schools; Verbum Dei will receive $160,000 annually for three years from the foundations as it strives to reach its optimum enrollment.

Mimi Schuttloffel, a Catholic schools expert at the Catholic University of America in Washington, said work-study is promising but it will take some time to determine whether the relatively new concept can become a long-term solution for a significant number of schools.

“This is not an easy thing to pull off,” said Schuttloffel, an assistant professor of education. “It requires a lot of work on the part of the school and a strong commitment from the business community, and there hasn’t been enough time to see how it holds up in the long run.”

Program Believer

Someone who believes in the program is Michael Scott Feeley, a partner at the downtown law firm Latham & Watkins, where four Verbum Dei students worked in the law library.

“A lot of employers are apprehensive about bringing in inner-city teenagers, but our experience with these students is that they have been great. They’re young men we have enjoyed knowing and working with, and we want them back next year.

“I would say that we have learned as much from them as they have from us.”

Miguel Ramos, 16, spent Tuesdays of his sophomore year at the firm, labeling periodicals and filing law books. Most days, he arrived early enough to have a bagel and juice in the firm’s cafeteria or to chat with lawyers about their work.

“What surprised me a lot was seeing how different the real world is,” Miguel said. “I like working a lot. They treat us like young men and co-workers and give us a lot of responsibility.”

Speaking at graduation ceremonies June 12, class valedictorian Michael Bell reflected on the grim prospects of many young men in Watts, South Los Angeles, Compton and some of the other communities Verbum Dei students call home. He talked about the poverty and violence, families without fathers, and high school dropout rates around 60%.

“The statistics say that we should have given in to the struggles and adversity,” said Bell, who will enter the University of San Francisco in the fall. “But we fought through all endeavors and now we have done the unexpected.”