CLEVELAND, Ohio – As Sister Maureen Doyle contemplated her upcoming retirement in May from Urban Community School, the Near West Side school she has directed for more than three decades, a piece of wisdom about nurturing children came to her.
Give your children roots and give them wings, the adage goes. “Roots to know where home is, and wings to fly off and practice what has been taught them.”
“I feel as though my own wings are fully developed,” Sister Maureen said, “and there are other things I can do now. I don’t know what that is yet, but there’s still something out there.”
Parents, students and graduates of Urban would certainly agree that Sister Maureen’s wings are wide and full. When they describe her profound influence on their lives, and the many ways, big and small, that she and the school have helped them, the image that comes to mind is of a guardian angel in human form.
That’s fitting, since Urban Community School is a kind of secular miracle. Serving children from 3 years old through eighth grade, the school proves that with enough support, even children from the poorest homes can thrive, with 90 percent going on to graduate from high school. Not all of them succeed, though, demonstrating how hard it can be for a child to overcome the gravitational pull of poverty.
Naturally, the school’s heart and soul would be a nun with wings.
“Without Urban and Sister Maureen, I probably would be an alcoholic, and probably would never have gone to college,” said Bob Duda, who graduated from Urban in 1991.
Duda was the youngest of eight children in a family that struggled with poverty and the turmoil brought on by their father’s alcoholism. All of the kids went to Urban, where Duda found the roots he needed. He was the first in his family to graduate from college.
But, he said, “Some of my siblings still struggle and continue that poverty cycle.”
He remembered how the sisters looked out for him, letting him stay late after school just to talk, or inviting him to the convent to have dinner.
“At home, we never had those family meals where you all sat around a table together,” Duda said. “I was always jealous of kids who had that.”
Duda did not realize until many years later that he was not the only student who didn’t have that kind of family, or got that kind of attention from the nuns. Everyone did, including his brothers and sisters.
“I thought I was the only one,” he said. “Sister Maureen and the other sisters and teachers made you feel that special.”
A vision of diversity, affordability
The Ursuline Sisters of Cleveland started Urban Community School in 1968, after the closing of St. Patrick and St. Malachi elementary schools in the late 1960s. The sisters wanted their school to be diverse, to reflect the neighborhood, to be affordable for families living in economic distress, and to give students individualized attention – fairly radical concepts in Catholic schools at the time.
Their vision led to a school that today has 550 students: 35 percent Hispanic; 30 percent Caucasian; 20 percent African American; and 15 percent other ethnicities, including a growing refugee population.
All students come from the neighborhood, and while 78 percent of families live at or below the poverty line, the school also offers places to a smaller group of students whose families are of greater means. “And their families are helpful to the school,” Sister Maureen said. “They volunteer, they coach. And the diversity’s there in the classroom.”
Tuition is calculated on a sliding scale according to families’ financial needs, with $110 a year the average. Full tuition is $7,400, but at present no one pays that.
Tuition covers 3 percent of the school’s $4.9 million annual budget. An Early Childhood Expansion grant and vouchers from the Cleveland Scholarship Program provide about $2 million, and the Ursuline nuns who work at the school donate back nearly 40 percent of their salaries. Community support adds $1.6 million, in addition to income from the school’s endowment fund.
Urban still offers the individualized attention its founders originated, allowing students to progress at their own pace through mixed-grade levels.
But though faith-based education is still part of the curriculum, with students required to attend either Catholic or Christian classes, Urban is not officially a Catholic school. It is an ecumenical, independent school in the Catholic tradition, Sister Maureen said, run by a board of directors and sponsored by the Ursuline Sisters.
Sister Maureen has been there for 34 of the school’s nearly 50 years, 30 of them as the director. That’s not including the year she volunteered at the school, when she was a 19-year-old Ursuline novice and was startled by her first glimpse of the “cold, dank and dreary” facilities.
Her time there as a novice helped her realize her vocation: serving disadvantaged children through education. She had seen, up close, that education is the way to get out of poverty, and she wanted to provide it.
She’s now 66, and in her years as teacher and director she has helped transform lives while overseeing a transformation of Urban that the school’s founders – not to mention that 19-year-old novice – might well consider miraculous.
A record of expanding dreams, high achievement
A large part of the transformation is concrete and visible. When Sister Maureen arrived as a teacher in 1983, Urban had 380 students and a long waiting list. It operated out of two old Catholic school buildings on the West 25th Street corridor, St. Malachi at one end and St. Wendelin at the other, neither of them offering amenities such as a gymnasium.
A strategic planning process in 1993 – the school’s first formal plan – launched the effort to grow and expand, and kick-started a fundraising drive to pay for a new building and to give Urban an endowment fund.
In 2005, the spectacular new $12 million building opened, on a large parcel of donated land at Lorain Avenue and West 49th Street. In 2011, a $5 million donation allowed for the construction of a connected, dedicated middle school, which opened in 2014.
Pledges to the endowment required by the strategic plan have reached $17 million.
But Sister Maureen does not consider those her most meaningful accomplishments.
“A lot of people would say, ‘She built the building.’ But from my perspective, what gives me the most satisfaction is being with graduates of the school,” she said.
“They come back, a lot of them, and they talk about why they have been successful, and they attribute a lot of that to what they got at Urban Community School. They speak with pride about their experience here.”
That success includes the high school graduation rate once students leave Urban: 90 percent graduate from high school within four years, and the school estimates that 65 percent then begin college.
By contrast, 66 percent of students in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District graduated from high school in 2014, the most recent statistic available. The school report cards released by the Ohio Department of Education in January 2016 showed that just 39.3 percent of the CMSD class of 2012 enrolled in college within two years.
Numbers like that get Sister Maureen to thinking: How and where did Urban help the students who, despite poverty and the other risks of inner-city life, went on to wonderful high schools and extraordinary colleges?
And what about the children who don’t make it, even with all that Urban offers them? She has sat with grieving mothers who have lost sons to gangs, and the school has helped pay for the funerals of former students killed at the hands of violence.
“Our kids are targets right here in this neighborhood,” she said. “We have kids whose parents are incarcerated and kids who are in jail themselves.”
Why do some succeed and others fall through the cracks?
Because sometimes poverty wins.
“You do everything,” said Tom Gill, the school’s associate director. “You hire the right teachers. You have the classroom aide. You feed them. But you can’t get them to school, or they just can’t do it behaviorally. Sometimes poverty is just a more powerful force, and no matter how good we think we are, we just can’t reach some kids.”
Unlike public schools, Urban has the ability to remove such students from the school.
“It’s a criticism we hear all the time,” Sister Maureen said, particularly when comparisons are made with public schools on graduation rates.
Urban, she said, removes only about five children a year, and only after going through an intervention process that includes the parents, the teacher, a school counselor or psychologist, and any outside agency assisting the family.
“We work with them so we can keep them,” she said, while acknowledging that it doesn’t always work. “Children act out oftentimes because of the consequences of poverty.”
Always more than just a school
But poverty doesn’t always win, and that’s what keeps Gill and Sister Maureen and everyone else at Urban going.
“I can remember loading up food in the back of the car and driving to somebody’s house and dropping it off, just because we knew they had six kids, and we knew for sure that [their] mom knew us, trusted us to preserve their dignity, and accepted things from the school,” Sister Maureen said, describing both the needs of the population and one of the solutions Urban offered.
Bob Duda remembers food deliveries, too, though as a child he was not entirely aware how much his family needed that help.
“You see your mom eat a sardine sandwich while you’re eating dinner, and she says it’s because she likes it, and you don’t realize until you get older that it was because there wasn’t enough food for everyone,” he said.
Duda went from Urban to Cleveland Central Catholic High School. He started college at Cuyahoga Community College, went on to the Pittsburgh College of Mortuary Science, and finished his degree at John Carroll University. He now works as a funeral director and embalmer at Bogner Family Funeral Home in North Ridgeville.
“None of that would have happened without Urban,” he said. “When I was at Central Catholic, my parents wouldn’t pay my tuition. So who do I call when I’m about to get kicked out? Sister Maureen. She made a few phone calls and worked with St. Augustine Church, and thankfully got it paid.”
Tuition payments were at times a problem at Urban, too. “I remember at eighth-grade graduation, I was bawling my eyes out because I knew my parents had not paid, and I knew I would get to walk with my class but I wouldn’t get my real diploma.”
When Sister Maureen handed the diploma cover to him, he opened it and the diploma was there. “She whispered to me, ‘Do you really think we weren’t going to let you graduate?’ “
Urban, said Sister Maureen, has always been more than a school, and this is one of the key reasons its students succeed. The school calls the approach the Whole Child Network, which encompasses academic, social, emotional, physical and spiritual development.
“We’re looking at the full scope of that whole child and that whole family,” Gill said. “Because they’re developing human beings, and you’ve got to think about all aspects of the child’s life if you’re going to have an impact.”
Individual attention – and an open heart
Partnership programs give Urban expanded opportunities to serve their students and community. The school offers after-school programs, in a partnership with Open Doors Academy, and summer camps, in partnership with St. Ignatius High School.
It is embarking on a partnership with Urban Squash Cleveland, a part of the National Urban Squash Educational Association. That group started in Boston about 25 years ago, when they saw research that showed squash programs at elite colleges offered scholarships, but half of those scholarships were never awarded because so few students played.
A new squash facility will break ground on the Urban campus this summer. “We donate the property,” Gill said. “Urban Squash Cleveland’s board raises the money to build the building. We’ll have half the slots for our students.”
Urban is hoping to build an early-learning center for children from birth to age 3 using a similar partnership strategy.
“Our board would build that on our property,” Gill said. “But another center would operate it, because that age group is not what we do; they do it well; and we want it on our campus.”
Agnes Akita, who has two children at Urban, was surprised by how far the school goes to support not just students, but the whole family.
Akita arrived in Cleveland from Uganda 11 years ago; both she and her ex-husband came here for graduate school at Case Western Reserve University.
By the time Akita met Sister Maureen through a priest at her church, she and her children had fled her home near CWRU and were living in a West Side domestic violence shelter.
“I was just this woman from Uganda in a shelter with two kids, and she right away wanted to help,” Akita said. “I was like ‘Wow, this woman doesn’t even know me, and she offered to pay my rent.’ “
Akita ended up making other arrangements. But, she said, “just that she offered, that was really, really touching. That’s an example of the extent she’ll go to, to get people back on their feet.”
As Bob Duda discovered, Akita found that she was not the only one on Sister Maureen’s radar. “It’s whoever she can help.”
Akita’s children, Selina, now 12 years old, and Fernando, 10, thrived at Urban, both academically and socially.
“What I really like about Urban is the diversity, not just ethnicity but cultural and financial,” she said. “There are people there who have been fortunate and people who are working hard and struggling, and immigrants. Every place has a culture, and they have this warm, humble atmosphere.”
Akita, who is 36, earned two master’s degrees from CWRU, one in nonprofit management in 2009 and the second in social work in 2014. She’s now studying in the registered nurse program at Tri-C. The academic piece of her children’s school is key for her.
She likes the individual attention, which starts when all teachers visit their students’ homes at the beginning of the school year.
“I love that,” she said. “So the children know the teacher, and the teacher knows them.” This helped when Akita went through a divorce, and her son was having a hard time. “The teachers really work with you,” she said.
Akita said she’s heartbroken that Sister Maureen is retiring.
“My children and a lot of other children consider Sister Maureen family,” she said. “And she’s a role model for me. When I look at her picture as a young nun with the children, I see this reflection of who I want to grow up and become.”
Duda said Sister Maureen and his teachers taught him how to imagine a different life when he grew up.
“Urban is such a special school because it is a place of love and acceptance,” he said. “They pushed me to dream bigger than staying in that circle of poverty. They taught me to dream.”
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