Next week, pupils at Holy Angels Elementary School will begin their summer vacation.
All three weeks of it.
But don’t expect that to bother pupils at the 107-year-old South Side institution, which has practiced year-round schooling in the concept’s truest sense for 20 years.
“I think it’s good for us to go to school in the summer because it keeps us off the street and because you don’t forget what you’ve learned,” 7th grader Maurice Howard said, expressing the opinion of many of his schoolmates.
In the Oakland neighborhood, where almost three out of every four people live in poverty and violent crime is an hourly occurrence, the school provides the safety and the structure its pupils need to make the most of their educations-educations that are much more than academics.
Holy Angels’ motto, “Where Proud Black Youngsters Produce and Achieve,” underscores the school’s overarching objective: to instill the self-respect and personal responsibility that will make its more than 1,300 pupils successful not only at the school but in life.
“Give children a sense of worth, like them for what they are, and you can take them wherever you want educationally,” explained Sister Helen Struder, Holy Angels’ acting principal and a member of the school’s staff since 1960.
Fulfilling its mission begins with the year-round academic calendar. The longest stretch away from school is the three-week break that begins next week. A few week or two-week breaks are mixed in, all of which adds up to a school year that is almost 40 days longer than the Chicago Public Schools calendar.
Without schooling in the summer, many of Holy Angels’ pupils would be watching television or hanging out on the streets. But by embracing its children as it has, Holy Angels, the largest Catholic elementary school in the country, has made itself into an important part of the lives of its pupils.
“They’re here all day long with their friends, playing, working and doing something constructive academically,” Struder said.
Finding a pupil who doesen’t agree is a challenge. Pupils seem universal in their praise for the school that confines them to often hot, sticky classrooms while other children are out playing.
“I like being in school,” 7th grader Leslie Smith said. “I’m with my friends. I like the togetherness of the school. It feels like just one big, happy family.”
A very big family. The school’s 1,321 pupils, from preschool to 8th grade, fill the school’s main building at 545 E. Oakwood Blvd. and its annex a few blocks away at 570 E. 40th St.
Many of the pupils are from the surrounding neighborhood. Others come from throughout the South Side. Many of the teachers are graduates of the school and parents of pupils.
Deneice Thomas, 34, is one of those teachers. A preschool instructor for seven years and the parent of a 6th grader, Thomas returned to Holy Angels because she felt she owed the school.
As a child growing up in the nearby Ida B. Wells public-housing complex, she attended Holy Angels. It saved her, she said.
“When I was going to school, I was not one of the best students, and they helped me through a lot of things,” she said. “I wanted to come back and give something back to the school.”
Last summer when Holy Angels did not hold its regular classes because of maintenance work, pupils realized what a critical part of the community Holy Angels is.
“Last summer when we didn’t have school and I got back, I felt like I didn’t know as much as when we had summer school,” said Leslie Smith, 12.
For Maurice Howard, last summer was nothing new. Summer was the biggest problem he had with Burke Elementary, the public school he attended before coming to Holy Angels three years ago.
“I’m glad I came here,” he said, “because every time I would get out of school, I would forget what I had learned.”
David Uttal, a Northwestern University psychologist who has compared U.S. schools to foreign schools with longer school years, said America has overstated the need for a long summer break and has underestimated students’ desire to go to school.
“We need to stop viewing school as something we need a break from,” Uttal said. “One of the things good schools do is communicate the value of education in children’s lives. When you have a long break, you kind of have a chance to forget that school is important. It communicates that it’s different, that you need a break, and that it’s not that important.”
About 2,000 schools nationwide have adopted some form of year-round education, but only a handful have increased the number of school days as Holy Angels and another Chicago parochial school, St. Mary of the Lake, have done, according the National Association for Year-Round Schooling.
For teachers at Holy Angels, the longer year and shorter breaks certainly make teaching and learning easier, but they said that just as important is the seriousness of purpose that the pupils develop.
“If you can get up there and the children respect you and are with you, you’re able to teach them everything and more,” said teacher Larry Landfair.
Discipline and structure are the cornerstones of the Holy Angels education. The two words pop up constantly in conversations with teachers and pupils. Discipline and structure, they said, make it possible for pupils to learn.
“I think we need the structure and discipline,” said 7th grader Jenifer Jeffries. “It helps us become better people, to know right from wrong.
“They teach us about life. How it’s not going to come easy. How you have to work for everything.”
For Landfair, it was the attitude of the pupils that drew him to Holy Angels.
“The obvious respect the children gave the teachers, it was constant in every class,” he said. “You can sense the stronger hunger for learning here.”
