When William Lombardo would see a homeless person, he wasn’t sure what to do. Sometimes he found himself giving money; other times he didn’t. At times, he would look at the person; other times he would walk away.
Now that he has worked a year as the coordinator of the community service program at The Latin School of Chicago, his attitude toward the homeless has changed, he says.
“Now I remind myself that they are people, and that I need to look at them,” he says quietly. “My sense of people with needs has changed and evolved since I started here.”
He hopes he can bring about a similar awareness among his students. “Many of them are not students of need. My aim is to get them to see life in a new way,” he says. “They see the homeless and hear of them, but they think of them as different sorts of people. They don’t think of the similarities (between the homeless and themselves). One of my charges is to have them view life as one unit-that we are all, in one sense, brothers and sisters, and we can make life better for other people.”
Sophomores are the main participants in the school’s community service program. “They are required to do 40 hours of community service in the sophomore year,” Lombardo says.
Students choose from a list of sites, such as a home for the mentally handicapped, shelters for the homeless or for battered women and a day-care center.
Though participation is mandatory, Lombardo hopes that the students will come to care about their work and won’t count hours. One such student is Siou Ou, a junior who served 80 hours of community service by the time she had finished her sophomore year. “It gave me a chance to meet people I would never have met otherwise,” she says.
Ou started in the program at Misericordia Heart of Mercy on Chicago’s North Side, a home for the severely mentally handicapped, where she read stories to participants and worked on the computer with them. She went on to work in a tutoring program for children from low-income families, and volunteered at a soup kitchen whenever she could.
By November of her sophomore year, Ou had completed her 40-hour requirement. “But I liked the experience of helping people and I was having fun,” she says, so she decided to continue.
In addition to the on-site volunteer work, students meet with Lombardo once a week to discuss their experiences and learn about what their classmates are doing.
“Sometimes (volunteering) is very difficult for the students,” Lombardo says. For example, “at a home for the elderly, they might hear the same stories over and over again,” he says. “Occasionally people don’t want the students there and are vocal enough to say, `I don’t want you here,’ and the student comes back frustrated.”
Lombardo tries to explain the possible reasons for the behavior of a senior citizen or homeless person so that the students don’t become discouraged. He begins by telling them that sometimes people in a shelter or an elder-care facility might be expressing a need for privacy.
“Maybe they are feeling ostracized and are having a hard time dealing with the facility,” he tells the students. He believes that the experience, good or bad, can shape a student’s perspective on life.
Lombardo was born in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood and graduated from Quigley Preparatory Seminary South in 1980. He went on to study speech at Loyola University and received a bachelor’s degree in that subject in 1984.
The choice of speech as his major was an accident, he says. “It was enjoyable, and I had a teacher I really liked in Speech 101. Since I was having fun . . . I decided to study speech,” he says.
His entry into teaching was the result of a chance meeting. “I had looked for a job all summer and had finally gotten one selling cars,” Lombardo says, recalling the months after his graduation. He had been a car salesman for three weeks and had sold one car when he met the principal of his former high school.
The school was looking for a teacher, and three days before the school year started, Lombardo found himself hired to run the community services program and teach religion to freshmen and sophomores.
“If I had a chance to do it all again, I would like to change my college major to education,” he says.
Lombardo, who was four years older than the oldest student in the school, remembers having to work hard to earn the respect of the faculty, many of whom remembered him as a freshman and sophomore student who hadn’t been interested in academics.
“I had to earn the respect of the students as well because they knew it was my first year teaching,” he says. He remembers an occasion when he suspected that a couple of seniors were using drugs at school. He confronted them and asked them never to attend his class in that condition again.
Lombardo hoped that his straightforward attitude would let the students know they could relate to him. Students gradually began to talk to him about personal issues, and he would in turn refer them to school counselors.
Lombardo also saw his return to his alma mater as an opportunity to do many things he hadn’t done as a student, such as participate in sports.
“As a faculty member it was an opportunity to become more involved,” he says. “While I was in high school, people didn’t really know what was going on in my mind. Nobody at the time said, `This is what you can do. These are your options.’ I wanted to be able to look out for the kids and make them feel that they could talk to me.”
After Quigley South closed in 1990, Lombardo moved to St. Patrick High School, 5900 W. Belmont Ave., where he taught religion for two years. He received his Illinois secondary school teaching certificate (which was not necessary to teach in Catholic schools) from Rosary College, River Forest, in 1993. He did his student teaching at Sandburg High School, Orland Park, in early 1993 and then came to work at Latin, 59 W. North Blvd.
Lombardo remembers the first time that, as a novice teacher in charge of the community service program, he accompanied students from Quigley South to volunteer at a facility for the mentally handicapped.
“It was a very difficult and yet moving experience,” he says. Impressed by the dedication of the volunteers and the staff there, Lombardo remembers feeling grateful that he and the students could help.
When he accompanies Latin students to their volunteer sites, he wants them to experience the same emotion.
“I love taking kids who have never gone to a soup kitchen or a shelter before,” he says. “I like hearing their reactions, especially when they say that while working there, they forget everything else they had to do.”
