New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
OUT OF THREE, ONE
A year ago, 3 city Catholic schools merged to form All Saints Academy. Now they say they’re all one family
NEW HAVEN — A year after three Catholic schools were merged into one, students, parents and teachers talk about All Saints Catholic Academy as a family, not just a place to learn.
And they are pleased that their school has been open for in-person learning all year, with strict measures to keep everyone safe, adjusting to the massive change that saw three Catholic schools in the city close, and a new leader who worked quickly to create a “sense of community.” Jennifer Stong’s son, Davyon Davis, was a pupil last year at St. Bernadette School, which closed along with St. Francis & St. Rose of Lima School and the Catholic Academy of New Haven in Westville. Opposition was especially strong from parents at St. Bernadette on the East Shore about their children going across the city to Fair Haven. (All Saints is housed in St. Francis & St. Rose of Lima’s building on Ferry Street.)
“In the beginning he was a little nervous” about making new friends at a new school, Strong said. But she’s glad she had Davyon go to All Saints. “He just fell right in,” she said. “That’s his school. He says he loves it.” She said
Davyon’s favorite subject is math, followed closely by religion.
“He likes going to the Catholic school because he gets to learn about the Bible,” she said.
Strong said she had concerns both about the safety of the neighborhood and about measures to keep everyone safe from the coronavirus.
“One thing is they make sure the kids have masks on up all the time. … I know they’re doing everything the right way to keep our kids safe,” she said.
Sister Diane Mastroianni, school principal, said there have been a few cases where a student had been exposed and the class had to go remote for a time, but that no one has gotten COVID-19 at All Saints.
With just 137 pupils in kindergarten to eighth grade, class sizes are small.
“They don’t skip a beat,” Strong said. “I love how they have small classes. They make sure that those kids get that extra help.”
Miguel Rosado said his reaction in February 2020 when he heard the Catholic Academy of New Haven in Westville would close was “sad, devastated, heartbreaking.” His grandson, Gavin Thomas, was in kindergarten.
Now both Gavin and his grandfather are pleased.
“The empathy, compassion of the staff has just been phenomenal, therefore the children’s faith in coming to this school just motivates the parents,” Rosado said. “When you see the joy every morning and they’re so happy to come to school … We consider ourselves extremely fortunate.”
Staying open
Mastroianni, a Bridgeport native who went to Notre Dame High School in Fairfield and Southern Connecticut State University, as well as Fordham University, came from Our Lady of Pompeii School in New York’s Greenwich Village, which closed last year, to serve as All Saints’ first principal.
Despite the pandemic, she said she felt strongly that the school should remain open for in-person classes. After her previous school went remote in March 2020, the idea that All Saints would not open its doors “did not sit right with me in any way,” she said.
“I was even more determined to get the building opened because here we were, a new school, faculty, staff, students. I didn’t know anybody,” Mastroianni said.
Once the Archdiocese of Hartford decided its schools would remain in person, “Predominantly our families were thrilled because they too recognize that nothing beats being in school for their children,” Mastroianni said.
The decision also helped working parents who would need childcare.
The faculty and staff then created a plan, including temperature checks for every person every day, wearing masks except for occasional breaks when the pupils are at their desks reading, arrows on the floor to keep pupils from getting too close together. Bathrooms, railings and doorknobs are cleaned multiple times a day, Mastroianni said.
“It’s very interesting how kids adapt,” she said. “Right now, it’s just normal that they’re wearing their masks.”
‘A mission’
Like other Catholic schools, All Saints actually added students from public schools that had not opened in the fall, such as New Haven. “We picked up about 10 or 12 families after the school year began, which again was a testimony to what people were hearing about our school,” she said.
The merger didn’t go perfectly. Of the 137 pupils at All Saints, 96 attended St. Francis & St. Rose of Lima last year, four came from St. Bernadette and 11 from Catholic Academy of New Haven. The rest are kindergartners or from other schools.
“Perhaps a bonus of someone like me coming into the mix is I didn’t know which kids were from where,” Mastroianni said. “That sense of community that I value as an educator … I try to create as quickly as possible. We’re a family and it’s a nice atmosphere.”
“It’s my goal that every child in the building knows one another so we can go to one another for help, for fun,” she said. “What is also a key component for me is that we have a service component.”
The school has held a fundraiser for veterans and collected items for baskets to give to firefighters, police officers and to women and children at the Life Haven shelter next door to the school. “We’re building what I hope are strong Catholic future leaders,” Mastroianni said. “We have a mission and we have a purpose to what we do and that drives everything else.”
The pandemic has made it a challenge to connect with families.
“I long for the day that I can have a community event for families to come together,” she said. “We don’t have those occasions to naturally bring people together.”
Slower decline in numbers
Enrollment in Catholic schools has been in decline for a number of years, Mara said. At the beginning of this year, the Archdiocese of
Hartford saw a decrease of 5 percent to 9,188 students, lower than the national average of 6.4 percent, she said. The decline has shrunk from 12.9 percent five years ago, she said.
Catholic elementary schools’ enrollment fell nationally by 8.1 percent, but the archdiocese’s schools declined only by 3.5 percent. “We attribute a good portion of that slighter decrease to the in-person instruction our schools offered,” Mara said.
Catholic education
Valerie Mara, interim superintendent of the archdiocese’s schools, said the Ferry Street school was chosen for the merger because of a commitment to urban education.
“We knew we wanted to preserve a Catholic school in the inner-city area of New Haven,” she said. “We wanted to build that school. It’s got a World School program; they are going to move to an International Baccalaureate program. Obviously, this year that had to be put on hold.”
The student body is ethnically and racially diverse. Tuition starts at $4,000 for Catholics who are active members of a parish (which helps subsidize tuition) and $4,500 for others, but there is a discount for additional children in a family, and 90 percent of the students are on scholarship, Mastroianni said.
“We do accept all faiths. We do welcome everyone,” she said. While every student must take religion, which is Catholic-based, “if someone is of a different religion, it would not be uncommon within the religion class for that student to speak about their religion.”
The school was refurbished with new paint, LED lighting and air conditioning. “As an older building it also has a lot of charm to it,” she said.
The school may be old — it was built in 1881 — but the curriculum is up to date.
Katherine Gonzalez’s children, Joshua Rivera and Kaylannie Colón, were pupils of St. Francis & St. Rose of Lima and now are in fifth and third grade.
“I saw the technology has been reinforced in school,” she said. “The kids have their own Chromebooks. The younger kids have iPads.” It helps that they don’t have to share devices, she said.
“Joshua’s telling me that he feels that he was in a new school. The uniform changed, the name changed, there was a lot of new students from the public school,” she said. He is getting high honors and even doing computer coding.
“For me the school is like a family,” Gonzalez said. “They have been very supportive to all the families and I love the way they teach all the children to be very supportive of the community.”
Lucia Rafala, whose twins, Abby and Eric Couvertier-Rafala, came from the Catholic Academy of New Haven, said she was reassured when she toured the school.
“It’s very clean. They’re small so we get to see the setup of the classroom and the distancing and there’s hand sanitizer everywhere,” she said.
“I didn’t feel comfortable sending them to my local public school” in North Haven, Rafala said.
“There were a lot of factors involved. One is the amount of attention the children get. They get a lot of assistance.”
The makeup of the student body also was important.
“We’re a multiracial family, so diversity is important to us,” she said. “The Catholic school has a more diverse flavor than the North Haven public school does.”
Gonzalez said she checked out the new school’s neighborhood as well; “I drove around at different times during the day and it seemed safe, it seemed nice.” Her children’s grandmother had gone to St. Francis School and so was able to describe it to them. She said the staff was “very open to parents’ concerns and figuring out ways to help the parents,” such as before- and after-school programs.
“We like the faith-based education,” Gonzalez said. “They focus on the tenets of our faith but also the character building. Jesus helped the poor. Jesus helped the people who were struggling and how can they put that into practice, so the kids do monthly service projects.”
Gonzalez also appreciates the teaching approach. “My children aren’t being taught to a test.
They’re taught to be thoughtful, intelligent, caring human beings. … My kids know a lot about realworld stuff. They know who important people are in the world,” including Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, scientists and artists.
“They really have a great, wellrounded background,” she said.
Gabrielle Beasley, an eighthgrader from Branford who attended St. Francis & St. Rose of Lima, said she appreciates the new technology, the new uniforms and that breakfast and lunch are now brought to the school, which the eighth-graders help distribute. “It still feels the same to me. It feels like a giant community,” she said.
“I get greeted with a smile every day,” she said.
The three eighth-grade boys have been going to school together since kindergarten. They’re known as the Three Amigos. “There’s obviously more students because we merged schools, but it’s basically the same since I got here,” said Alexander Chavarria of West Haven. “Everyone’s included in everything and no one’s left behind.”
Jumar Vaccianna of New Haven praised Mastroianni as being “in tune with the students. … She really makes everybody laugh. I wish I had her before.”
Justin DeJesus of New Haven agreed. “Sister Diane has definitely gone through this the right way and she knows how to take the situation [in] hand,” he said.
Teachers
The faculty were chosen from each of the three former schools.
“I cannot say enough about their commitment to the students who are in front of them and to All Saints Catholic Academy,” Mastroianni said. “That could have been an extraordinary challenge, but they’ve all risen to the occasion.”
J.C. Boynton, who teaches Spanish and is director of family and community engagement, had taught at Catholic Academy of New Haven and had attended St. Francis School.
“I think things are going great,” he said. “I love this neighborhood … I’m a strong believer in Catholic education. Really, we need to put Christ in our kids’ minds and hearts and in our classrooms and basically I think we’re doing a fantastic job.”
Sherri Criscuolo teaches fifth grade, which she taught at Catholic Academy for 30 years. “There’s so many similarities. Children are children,” she said. “It’s very family-like here. We have a phenomenal leader, Sister Diane.”
She said the families also have been supportive, telling her they are “so happy to have you here. If there’s anything I can do to make your start seamless, please let me know.”
Mastroianni is a sister in the Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, who teach at Sacred Heart Academy in Hamden, with whom she lives. “This for me in many ways has been a coming home,” she said. “When our sisters came to the United States, this is where we landed.”
“Yes, this was a very difficult time for everyone and we don’t deny that,” she said. “However, the fruit that is coming from that can’t be denied either.
“If I zeroed out COVID, I would say it’s been a normal school year,” she said. “What happened here is nothing out of what I would call the ordinary of new school (year) beginning. It’s been nice. I thank God for that.”