1629-15 Community Church I
SUN MAR 04 1984 ED: NEIGHBORS
SECTION: NEIGHBORS MB PAGE: 12 LENGTH: 922 MEDIUM
ILLUST: color photo: Rosario Contreras and Mary Ellen Munday;
photo: St. Patrick' s school (5 ) ,
SOURCE: IRENE LACHER Herald Staff Writer
DATELINE:
MEMO: COVER STORY / SCHOOLS
LATIN EYES ARE SMILING AT ST. PATRICK'S SCHOOL
The uniforms can't mask the varied backgrounds of the students at St.
Patrick' s School, left, waiting to eat lunch at the school cafeteria. Sandy
Fuentes, 11, and Eleonore Maillebiau, 10, far left, enjoy an after-lunch game
of patty- cake outside the gym. Below, five-year-olds Ivan Restrepo, left, and
Armando Ramos play on the monkey bars during recess . Sister Carmelina Guzman,
below right, the only nun who teaches full- time at the school, leads a
first-grade religion class in song.
Socorro Cortes was a young Colombian bride, experiencing the dawn of her
married years in the Miami Beach of 1973.
Around her new home at Jefferson Avenue and Ninth Street the air was
warmer, the gardens more compelling and the streets were cleaner than in her
mountain home in Bogota. And she was in America. She wanted to belong.
Before Cortes had children of her own, a friend invited her to attend a
karate and cheerleading presentation at St. Patrick' s School in Miami Beach.
She was charmed.
"In Colombia we don't have cheerleaders, " Cortes recalled. "I always
loved them. It seemed really American to me. "
Cortes later contributed her progeny -- Katheline, now 10, and Jennifer,
8 -- to the mass of 340 students who recite their prayers and multiplication
tables at the school at 3900 Garden Ave.
Students at the eggshell-colored school no longer come from families
named McGuire and O'Neill, as they did 30 years ago when the St. Patrick' s was
80 per cent Irish. More than 90 per cent of the Fighting Shamrocks now are of
Latin American heritage -- roughly double the percentage at Miami Beach' s
only public junior high school, Nautilus, which is 46 per cent Latin.
Latin families flock to parochial schools because they consider a
Catholic education the best they can give their young, said Father James
Murphy of St. Patrick' s Church.
"Especially with Hispanic people, they will make sacrifices to send their
children to Catholic school, " he said. "There is a tremendous desire to pass
on the culture and faith. . . . And many are either fleeing communism or the
threat of communism. Naturally they will run to what is Catholic. "
Parents such as Cortes have been a blessing to Catholic schools in the
area. While declining enrollment and tough economic times have brought many
parochial schools elsewhere to their knees, Dade ' s Catholic schools uniformly
enjoy waiting lists. About 100 children are waiting for openings at St.
Patrick' s, which teaches kindergarten through eighth grade.
If they are admitted, students ' parents pay from $900 to $1, 100 a year
for the privilege of sending their children to the only Catholic school south
of 86th Street, where St. Joseph' s Parish School, Miami Beach' s only other
Catholic school, makes its home.
They will be buying a more demanding academic program than that provided
by public schools, according to St. Patrick' s Principal Christine Lamadrid.
On SRA achievement tests, a standardized test given the country' s eighth-
graders, St. Patrick' s students score comfortably above the national average.
St. Patrick' s began changing some 20 years ago, when Cubans began
migrating to the Miami area. Now the student body is even more diverse,
populated mostly by Hispanic children from countries to the south, but also
finding its representatives from England, Greece and India.
"It ' s as different as the world is different, " Lamadrid said.
1
The Fighting Shamrocks who wield the bats and balls of the school ' s
athletic teams now answer to the names Silvio, Orlanda and Solalba. In the
second grade alone, there are a dozen nations represented. There are only 21
children.
But there is no harbor for bilingual education here. Outside of Spanish
class, instruction is almost exclusively in English.
"This is the USA and they need to speak English, " Lamadrid said.
"They are American first, " Cortes said of her children as she noted her
agreement with that philosophy.
"In the beginning of the year some of them come in speaking only
Spanish, " said Sister Carmelina Guzman, the school ' s religion coordinator. "In
a few months I hear them chitchatting in English. One boy said to me, ' Did I
say that in English or Spanish? I get it mixed up. ' "
Despite the budding athletes ' Fighting Shamrocks sobriquet and the
prominence of St. Patrick' s Day at the school -- students get to shed their
tartan uniforms in favor of almost any suitable garb as long as it ' s green and
white -- the school ' s appeal to many of its Latin families is all American.
Take the school ' s brush with fame earlier this month. The talk of the
school was an appearance by St. Patrick' s cheerleaders at a Miami Dolphins
game, an honor accorded them for capturing the title of best cheerleaders in
the Miami Archdiocese.
In the beginning, 1926, St. Patrick' s shared a homeland with most of the
student body. The families who sent their children there were as wealthy as
the patrons of the polo stables the school replaced.
The Depression seemed distant from St. Patrick' s parish. On Sunday
mornings, the grounds of the church, which abut the school, was like "a
chauffeur' s convention, " recalled John Ingraham, 69, who has maintained the
church property for 48 years .
The famous and the infamous joined hands there in search of the divine.
Al Capone built the school gym in 1935 . Ingraham remembered Capone ' s son, Al
Jr. , as a popular student when he attended school there in the 1930s. "Wealth
gets along with wealth, " he said.
Those were the days when New York City Mayor Jimmy Walker' s wife,
Jeanette, sold religious items in the gift shop abutting the school, when
Miami Beach developer Carl Fisher would come to meet with his close friend,
Monsignor William A. Barry, who founded the school.
Families who made their fortunes in the auto industry, including the
Firestones, would present themselves for Barry' s instruction. In the 1940s,
Fulton Sheen, then a monsignor, would preach at St. Patrick' s during his
Miami Beach vacations and retire to a back room to write.
On the auditorium walls, a former student painted a striking mural
illustrating the history of Catholicism in the New World, but that was so
long ago, even Ingraham can't recall the artist.
Ingraham, dubbed "The Bishop" by the children, remembers it all. Mostly
he remembers the monsignor, whose family devoted itself to Catholic education
in Miami and founded Barry University, a small college in Miami Shores.
No matter where he was in the sprawling Spanish-style complex, Ingraham
knew the day had begun when he heard a crashing sound coming from the
direction of the bell tower across the street from the church.
It was always Barry slamming the door to the tower building, which
contained his quarters, on his way to mass. It happened every morning at 8 .
Behind their hands, the children called him "Wild Bill. "
Barry is remembered as strict but not rigid, an educator who brought out
both obediance and affection from his charges until injuries from a car
accident forced him to retire to St. Francis Hospital in 1965 . He died two
years later.
A photograph of Barry hangs on a wall in Lamadrid' s office. He is seated
among 40 children in their communion best, who radiate out from his center in
a perfect white triangle.
Lamadrid -- an O' Sullivan before marriage -- is in the picture too. When
she assumed the helm of St. Patrick' s this year, she was coming home. She
attended the school from 1955 to 1968, when it had a high school as well.
Lamdrid, 33, taught at St. Patrick' s in 1973 and 1974 and left to have a
child. When she was ready to return to work, however, St. Patrick' s wasn't
ready for her. With no openings there, she joined the St. Agnes School staff
on Key Biscayne until Murphy invited her to take the principal ' s job this
year.
Partly, she missed her "babies, " as she likes to call the younger
children -- she had been working with junior high schoolers at St. Agnes.
Partly, she wanted to return to the place responsible for "everything
good that I am today . . . academically, spiritually, morally. "
"When I was in the second grade, Monsignor Barry would say to a friend
and to me, ' I know you girls are going to be nuns. ' Now I look at his picture
and think, 'No, I 'm not a nun. But I 'm doing your work. ' "
She opted instead for motherhood. "I have the best of both worlds, "
Lamadrid said with satisfaction.
She is a strong presence. Motherly, humorous and firm, she rules by moral
suasion.
"I want kids to be orderly, but I also want a relaxed atmosphere, " she
said. "I don' t think kids can learn unless they are happy at school. "
Marilyn Meireles, a 12-year-old seventh grader, said that Lamadrid' s
strictness has earned her a reputation for being mean among some students.
"But I think she ' s nice, " she said.
"She doesn 't treat you like a prisoner. She treats you like a friend, "
said sixth-grader George Laures, 11 .
Not long ago, Lamadrid was sailing down a breezy corridor lining one of
the school ' s interior courtyards . She came across a small girl with a long
brown ponytail.
"Ruby, Ruby, what ' s the matter?" she cooed.
The child sank into Lamadrid' s arms and the principal planted a kiss on
her head.
"Nothing, " Ruby said.
Down the hall, Sister Carmelina Guzman was introducing one of the
school ' s first-grade classes to Catholic theology.
She leads the children in song, tells them bible stories, gives them "a
minute to tell Jesus your own little secrets, " and dares them to solve
religious anagrams in an alphabet of umbrellas, musical notes, octopi and ice
cream cones.
"It ' s brainwashing for Jesus, " Sister Carmelina said mischievously. "It' s
fun time. "
Sister Carmelina, a nun of the Teresian order, is the school ' s only full-
time teaching nun. Across the country lay teachers are taking over most
Catholic school instruction as fewer and fewer people enter religious orders.
Teachers ' pay here is less than wages made by public school teachers,
Lamadrid said, although she declined to provide salary figures. Their Dade
public school counterparts start at $15 , 083 .
One teacher noted that because salaries are lower, the teaching staff is
comprised entirely of women with one exception -- Coach Arturo Fernandez, who
runs the athletics program.
There is also some personal sacrifice here. Maria Diaz, who has two
children at St. Patrick' s, said she surrendered a job in genetics research for
the Dade County Health Department to teach science at the school .
"I really compromised a lot of my own goals because I believe in
Catholic education, " she said.
These days Joan Munday also believes in Catholic education. When she sent
her first child to St. Patrick' s, she was primarily looking for teachers who
would brook no nonsense and provide the structure her son, John, now 14 and
in eighth grade, needed to learn.
The Mundays eventually made a St. Patrick' s education a family affair.
Scarlett, 12 , and Mary, 6, later joined their brother there.
Munday explained her attraction to the school: "Everything they teach,
they teach in the bounds of morality. . . . It' s not the religion, per se. "
You see, the Mundays are Protestant.
ADDED TERMS: profile school
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