With one arm wrapped around bouquets of red and pink roses and bunches of shimmery silvery balloons proclaiming “You’re the Tops,” and her other hand holding her commencement cap in place, Khadijat Kareem shouts above the din of a jubilant crowd, “I wouldn’t be graduating if I didn’t come to this school.”
Kareem, 17, is headed for Howard University in Washington; she intends to become a civil rights attorney. She was accepted at five other schools but chose Howard “because that’s where Thurgood Marshall went” and her “ultimate goal,” she says, is to become a Supreme Court justice.
Kareem’s mother made her go to Josephinum High School, the all-girls Catholic school on Oakley Boulevard in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood. Kareem had pushed for a public high school and the boys and best friends that went along with it-but Mom won that one. “Now I know I wouldn’t have finished in a public school,” says Kareem.
Jostling through the well-wishers, she finally reaches her “very best friend,” Porsha Tameka Taifa. Hugs, smiles, tears. Taifa, 18, also laden with flowers, balloons and gifts galore, wears an Olympic-like red-white-and-blue ribbon with an enormous gilt medallion that reads “Valedictorian.”
“My grammar school grades were so low, I didn’t think even a public school would take me,” she almost whispers. “Education wasn’t important to me.” But Taifa will start at Loyola University this fall on partial scholarship. She wants to be an elementary school teacher so she can be remembered as a person “who helped the next person get ahead in life.”
Kareem and Taifa are two of 58 young women who received their diplomas from Josephinum this month in an exultant ceremony that attracted a camera-toting throng of aunts and cousins and grandparents, parents, neighbors, boyfriends, co-workers and, for some, their own children.
“All our moms are graduating,” said a thrilled Sister Bonnie Kearney, Josephinum’s principal and a member of the Religious of the Sacred Heart order of nuns, just before sending each graduate down the long center aisle of St. Aloysius Church to the majestic strains of “Pomp and Circumstance.”
“You OK?” she’d ask each one, adding a few personal words, then, “Just relax. Smile. Go.”
This was Josephinum’s 100th graduation class. But the exuberance of the night reflected personal victories rather than merely a centennial celebration.
Some of the graduates are the first in their families to receive high school diplomas. Three are mothers; some are pregnant. And about half of this graduating class entered Josephinum below grade level in some academic area, generally math or English; some tested as low as 4th-grade reading level. Yet a majority of the graduates will go on to college or specialized training.
Though some commute from as far away as Oak Park and Evanston, most are from Chicago. About half are Hispanic, half black. They came from public and Catholic elementary schools (fewer than half are Catholic).
College-bound class
Of 60 seniors, 58 graduated (one student was just half a credit shy); 44 received acceptance letters from schools as varied as DePaul University, Alabama A&M, Michigan State, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northern Illinois University, Tougaloo College in Mississippi and Johnson & Wales University, a culinary institute in Rhode Island; 25 seniors received multiple acceptances. If a trend of the past two years continues, by fall 85 percent of the graduates will undertake further education, says Kearney, adding: “It could be higher with this class. We pushed them.”
Those figures are impressive, particularly for an inner-city high school and because the figures have been climbing since the mid-’80s, when only about 66 percent of Josephinum’s graduates went on to college.
(The Chicago Board of Education estimates that 65 to 75 percent of public high school graduates go on to some form of higher education, based on surveys completed by the seniors. About 85 percent of the seniors at Catholic high schools in the city go on to college.)
Some say it’s Kearney who’s responsible for the increased number of graduates going on to college, who’s the inspiration, the organizer, the disciplinarian, the power source behind the rejuvenation of Josephinum, a school that almost shut down in 1985, on the verge of financial collapse.
The early days
Today’s Josephinum is hardly the school that was founded before the turn of the century as an elite academy for girls of German heritage. In September 1886, Mother Philomena Schmittdiel, the American superior of the Sisters of Christian Charity, buried a small statue of St. Joseph in an empty field across the street from St. Aloysius Church, signifying her intention to buy the property and build a school for girls that she would call St. Joseph’s Academy.
When the building opened in 1890, the Latin word “Josephinum,” which roughly translates to “the house of Joseph,” was carved above the entrance portico.
Pretty much a finishing-and-boarding school for students age 7 to 21 in its early days, Josephinum focused on the three Rs, plus religion, German penmanship, piano practice and domestics, until the early 1900s, when it initiated a commercial course to train women for white-collar office work and an academic course for those who wanted to be teachers.
By 1985, faced with a $105,000 deficit, a changed neighborhood and a significant drop in enrollment (to 233, from 850 in the mid-’60s), the Sisters of Christian Charity announced the closing of Josephinum.
There was a brief closing, a respite thanks to intensive fundraising campaigns, a shut-down because of a teacher dispute over salaries and, finally, a reorganization under a lay board of directors, which operates the school. Four members of the Sisters of Christian Charity remain on the staff. Kearney, of the Sacred Heart order, was hired as principal in 1990, and four other members of her order have joined the faculty since then.
Kearney had taught at such schools as Sacred Heart Academy, Providence-St. Mel’s High School and Gordon Tech, and been involved in campus ministry at Loyola University and therapeutic day care for children with Catholic Charities. Yet she says she was ready for something that called for “more giving to others.” When the Josephinum offer came along she looked at it as “the opportunity to work with young women who needed a rootedness, a security gained by having people know them as individuals. They’re enough of a number everywhere else.”
High standards
Kearney calls the 1994 graduates “my class. This is my fourth year here, and it’s the first class I’ve been with the whole time.”
Sister Pamela Hickey, who is a faculty member and counselor and a Sacred Heart nun, says those four years have seen changes in the curriculum, but, just as significantly, also in attitudes and motivation.
“Bonnie expects them to do real high-school work. They complain, say things are too hard, but they seem proud when they accomplish. She’s added some advanced classes for students who are ready, and more programs that will make them think about tomorrow. The aim is to get them ready for the job world or the next level of education-or both.”
“What we’ve developed,” says Kearney, “would probably be called a good business program. We give them skills that they can live on. We tell them we expect them to go beyond high school, but you may need to pay your way to get there.”
Kearney has raised the number of credits required for graduation to 24 from 22, and added courses in trigonometry, precalculus, anatomy, physiology, decision-making, cultural crafts, commercial art and drama. And, “thanks to a generous gift of 24 state-of-the-art computers,” she says, a computer class is a requirement.
But it’s the extra programs-ranging from boosting self-esteem to self-defense, resume writing, skill-building and guidance for below-level incoming freshmen-that she prefers to talk about.
Peace Peers, for example, is one of Kearney’s additions. “It’s a form of negotiating, conflict resolution. Kids learn how to mediate disagreements and difficulties with each other, to learn to talk through problems rather than act them out. The hope is that they’ll take that into their homes, their future lives.”
“Shadowing” is another pet project. “For some of these families, there’s no such thing as `take your daughter to work.’ Some of the parents are professionals, but some students don’t have working parents. But we had to let these girls know there’s a world out there. We had places like (the accounting firm) Price Waterhouse, Pivot Point beauty salons, Columbia College, the accounting department of DePaul University, St. Mary of Nazareth Hospital take our kids into their workplaces. They were assigned to someone in a profession the student was interested in, and they stayed with them and talked with them and literally shadowed that person to see what that profession was like.
“Before our first group went out, we practiced introductions, talked about what to wear for business. For some it was like going to China, not just downtown Chicago. We were a wreck waiting for them.
“Then they came back and they talked and they talked. And they knew they had conquered something and survived. There’s no way for some of them to know what that world of business is like.” Now “Shadowing” is a requirement for graduation.
A tough principal
Some students think Kearney is tough, but they give “tough” their own spin. “Too much discipline,” says one in a group during lunchtime one school day. From another: “Detentions for every little thing. You can be one second late, just one second. You get a detention.” Adds another: “She even makes the boys stay on the other side of the street after school.”
Says Hickey: “Bonnie doesn’t make rules lightly, but if they’re on the books, you’d better believe we do it. We back up rules because that offers stability, and some have little stability in their lives.”
Hickey says one of the most important things is that “Bonnie makes this a safe place to be.”
That means a lot to parents.
When a number of them were asked why they send their daughters to Josephinum, the most frequent answers were: no gangs, no boys (“I can relax,” said one mother), discipline, low tuition, attention and care, a good education.
At $1,750 a year (plus registration, book rental and other fees that could total $75), Josephinum’s tuition is the lowest of any Catholic high school in Chicago. Still, one-third of its students receive financial aid. About $55,000 went to such aid last year. Raising money is always a priority, Kearney says. Last year, only about 37 percent of the cost of educating students was paid through tuitions; fundraisers and contributions of cash and services made up the rest.
Kearney says the school board keeps the tuition low “to make sure that it’s not only the rich who have a quality education.”
Planning ahead
Lisa Thornton Godbold, a pediatrician at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, has been a member of the school’s board of directors for four years. She says that under Kearney, Josephinum is “more organized, it’s more financially stable. Let’s say everything’s more coherent.
“There’s a chemistry in the board and the administration that is coming together to make the school more effective.”
Godbold describes Kearney as “very dedicated, very passionate about the school. And she is tough. She is dogmatic in what she wants and will not back off an issue that involves the direction the school should take. That love of the school has to have an effect on the girls and on their education.”
“We’re actually talking about where we’re going to be in the 21st Century, population-wise, curriculum-wise. And, there’s no question: We are going to be here.”
Says Kearney: “When we look at what we do at Josephinum, we believe our achievement is that we can help kids not give up.
“I am getting more satisfaction out of this than a lot of things I’ve done in my life. Because these are kids that might be missed, and they have every bit as much potential as other people.”
