St. Rose of Lima School Alumni Association

Asbury Park Press
02/01/04

School alumni return to their old neighborhood to do some good
Published in the Asbury Park Press 02/01/04
http://www.app.com/app/story/0,21625,898725,00.html

Going Back To Give Back
By Joseph Picard
Staff Writer

NEWARK -- "We really are the same people and should be helping each other."Carol Raab Davis. Carol Raab Davis of Stephan Avenue in Dover Township had not visited her elementary school, St. Rose of Lima in Newark, in 40 years when she returned in October 2002.

Nahquasia Robinson, 7, a second-grader at St. Rose of Lima school in Newark, works on a computer with help from Fran Scuilli of Spring Lake, the school's volunteer technology coordinator.

" I was truly transported back," said Davis, who graduated from St. Rose in 1960. "The rooms were the same. So was the echo in the hallway. I shut my eyes and recalled so much about my past. An eighth-grade girl, one of the students who'd been showing us around, broke my reverie by offering me a cup of coffee. I looked at her and thought, 'This is me again. She and I are the same person.' "

The fact that she was a white, adult suburbanite and the eighth-grader was an inner-city black girl did not interfere with Davis' vision of shared humanity.

In 1967, however, the year the Raab family left Newark, racial lines were starkly drawn in the state's largest city. In July of that year, Newark erupted in five days of violence that left 23 people dead -- all but two of them black people -- 725 injured and more than $10 million in property damage.

Linda Kaufer, nee Linda DeRosa, St. Rose Class of 1968 and now a resident of Hazlet, was 13 and living on Seventh Avenue in Newark at the time of the riots, a few blocks from the Raabs and the school.

"I remember the National Guard vehicle with the machine gun rolling down the street, passing our house," she said. The DeRosas departed Newark the following year.

The riots, when added to rising property taxes, a deteriorating downtown, years of tense racial relations and the disruption of old neighborhoods by the construction of Interstate 280, spurred "white flight" -- the exodus in the late 1960s and early 1970s of families of European descent from Newark to the suburbs, including the Shore.

But Davis, Kaufer and about 50 other current Shore area residents have gone back to Newark, to their first alma mater and not just for a one-time trip down memory lane. They are members of the St. Rose of Lima Alumni Association, a 150-member organization officially incorporated in February 2003 with the stated mission "to serve the students and the school through advocacy, counsel and fund raising."

The association has put its money and its time where its official mouth is.

The alumni have sponsored a class trip, as well as luncheons and dinners for the school staff. They've provided transportation for school outings, arranged a reading program and an art appreciation program, provided funds for equipment repairs and donated items such as guitars, DVD players and VCRs.

"This is my 30th year as principal of St. Rose, and I have never seen anything like this group," said Arthur L. Wilson, the school principal. "First of all, you almost never hear of an elementary school alumni association. Secondly, they're not like some people who only talk about doing things. These people actually do things for the school, the students and the staff. It's wonderful, and we're grateful."

"It was very weird when they first came walking through the school," said DeNisha Hooker, 13, of Stuyvesant Avenue in Newark, an eighth-grader at St. Rose, recalling the October 2002 visit of about 30 alumni members, all white adults, to a school where almost all of the 310 kindergarten-through-eighth-grade students are black.

"I didn't know what they wanted," Hooker said. "I didn't think they were going to do anything for us. Later, however, we got to talk to them and to know them. They're very nice."

"They've done a lot for the school," said Micah Joyner, 13, also a St. Rose eighth-grader, from Tiffany Boulevard, Newark. She and Hooker will attend Immaculate Conception High School in Montclair in September. "And it's fun to talk with them. I didn't know the school went back so far."

The school and the church go back 113 years. The alumni as-sociation dates from 2001, when two nostalgic endeavors met in cyberspace.

Carol Raab Davis was communicating with some ex-school-mates via e-mail, trying to or-ganize a reunion for the St. Rose of Lima Drum & Bugle Corps, when she learned that another alumnus who was living in Oregon at the time had started a web site dedicated to the old Newark neighborhood.

The site got more and more visitors, including Davis and her friends. An alumni reunion event was organized by Davis and Susan Kemka (who became the initial Chairman of the Association). Davis and Kemka coordinated their efforts so that the two reunions occurred on the same weekend in October 2002, and numerous alumni visited the school.

"We had such a great time re-connecting with each other, and an even more extraordi-nary time visiting the school and meeting the children, that afterward a group of us decided that we could not just leave it at that," Davis said. "We had to do something for those stu-dents."

"The older I got, the more I realized that the quality of the education I received at St. Rose gave me a leg up in the world," Crowley said. "When I saw that the school was still trying to maintain that high quality of education, I knew I wanted to do something to help."

"I want to give back to this school and this parish that gave me a chance when I was a child," said Hazlet's Kaufer. Kaufer and her sister, Denise Wiener of Holmdel, another St. Rose graduate, volunteer their time to run the art program at the school. "I want these chil-dren to also have a chance."

Diane Matta, from South Port-land Drive in Little Egg Har-bor, a 1970 St. Rose graduate, agreed that the students are the main magnet drawing the alumni's attention.

"They welcome you. They re-spect you. They appreciate what you do for them," Matta said. "It's such a pleasure to see them so well-behaved, too. Kids are not so disciplined and po-lite in public school."

Principal Wilson pointed out that the entire neighborhood has changed since these alumni members were Newark resi-dents and students at the school.

"Everything has changed. I've witnessed the change," Wilson said. "Stores, landmarks, hous-es, whole neighborhoods that were here are just gone now. The people living here are all different now. The only thing that has not greatly changed is the school. The faces have changed, but what we do here, what goes on here, is still the same. And these alumni know that. They have such a drive to help this school that it is truly remarkable."

Despite the group's effort, St. Rose of Lima received a harsh reminder of the reality of inner-city life when, during Christmas break, the school building was broken into and the nine DVD players and VCRs that the alumni associa-tion had donated were stolen.

"It's discouraging, but it cer-tainly isn't going to stop us," Crowley said, noting that the St. Rose of Lima Alumni Asso-ciation is preparing for a new election of officers.

"We're looking to continue to do things for the school," he said. "A scholarship fund is one thing we'd like to make a reali-ty."

"You have to keep in mind that the parents must be making sacrifices to send their children to St. Rose, so that they can get a better education," Davis said. "Our parents did the same thing, made sacrifices to send us to St. Rose. We really are the same people and should be helping each other."

Joseph Picard: (732) 557-5738 or jpicard@app.com

* This article has been slightly edited by SRLAA's webmaster to ensure factual content and accuracy. All edits are in Italics.