By Sandra MillerNorth End Regional ReviewA pair of St. John alums walked into the school last week, looking for Sister Eileen Harvey, their old principal.
When Sister Eileen spotted 2003 alums Max DeGrandis and Ricky Scimeca, she burst into a huge smile and gave them hugs. They talked about going onto St. Mary’s in Lynn and Matignon High in Cambridge, but said they wished St. John’s went onto all 12 grades.
“I miss the smell of this school,” said DeGrandis. “It was home. It was a safe school.”
Of course it was safe here – it’s a small school, with a nun for a principal who’d put the fear of God into everyone.
“If anybody was acting up, it wouldn’t be allowed,” said DeGrandis. “You’d be taken outside.”
Scimeca said most kids ended up in Sister Eileen’s office at one time or another, in need of a little straightening out. “We all ended up in her office, shaking,” he said, laughing. “You do something wrong, the spotlight’s on you. You don’t want Sister Eileen upset at you.”
They talked about the Red Sox, and reminisced about the limo drives for lunch at the Prince House of Pizza and the Hilltop they earned for selling the most candy bars in one of the school’s many fund drives. Scimeca remembered starting the day with morning prayer as well as the Pledge of Allegiance. “It was a good way to start the day,” he said. “It was like a sense of family here.”
That’s why families love St. John’s, for its small-school atmosphere, its feeling of safety, and for getting a good Catholic education. Sister Eileen’s been providing that for 25 years now, successfully reaching her goals is to keep her K-8 classes full and the bank account healthy.
For all of her hard work, parents will be feting her silver anniversary at the school’s annual fundraising gala, to be held April 4 at the Coast Guard base.
“Everyone loves Sister Eileen,” said one of the event’s organizers, Ginny Innocenti, who lives with Sister Eileen in Somerville, and a former kindergarten teacher who now works in the office. “The school wouldn’t be here without her.”
Eileen Harvey grew up in Brighton, with two older brothers, raised by Irish immigrants, and attended parochial school since first grade. When she was 17, she decided to enter the convent, which was hard on her, since at the time she wasn’t allowed any contact with her family. She went from attending a Catholic school to, three years later, teaching at one – the only time she didn’t set foot in a parochial school was when she wasn’t old enough for school, and when she was in her canonical year.
She started studying at Regis College to become a teacher in 1954, not getting her degree until 1963, a normal pace for the Sisters of St. Joseph. When the church relaxed some of its rules in the 1960s, she was relieved that she could finally have her mother visit, on Saturdays. The habits became optional.
“We were seen as normal people,” she said. “People saw that we were serving the lord as best we can. I tell the kids that I make mistakes, too. It’s the choices we make that make the difference. They don’t see me as an angry person, and yet something makes a difference.”
She was an elementary school teacher teaching mostly first-graders at St. Agatha’s in Milton, Our Lady of Christians in Newton, and St. Catherine’s of Sienna in Somerville.
But as is the way in Catholic education, she started getting asked to move into administration, but kept ducking them. “First grade is my love,” she said. “I said, ‘Why don’t you leave me alone? I love what I’m doing. I love the children.’” But after years of persistence, they wore her down. “I said, ‘Enough of this nonsense. I said ok.”
So she looked at a half-dozen openings around the area, but when she heard about the North End opening, it gave her pause. She was a Brighton girl who had never been to the North End. During the Feast of St. Joseph, she met St. John’s principal, Sister Catherine, who asked her if she was looking at St. John’s. “I had to ask her, ‘How do you get to the North End?’”
St. John’s started as a large brick warehouse on Moon Street, purchased in 1943 to a “free church “ of St. John the Baptist to meet the needs of Irish immigrants. By 1895 the parochial school opens to 300 boys and 500 girls, many from Italy. The next year, Rose Fitzgerald, the mother of JFK, is enrolled. The North End was once home to three parochial schools, but by 1982 St. John’s became the last one standing in the North End, and today is part of St. Leonard’s Parish.
When Sister Eileen took a tour of the school, she fell in love. “There was a hominess to the place. The children were warm and friendly. There was order in the school. A lot of what I believe in as an educator was here.” Needless to say, the next day the pastor had called and hired her. “I said, ‘Are you sure, Father?’”
She met the parents that spring. “They were sizing me up. And they were talking while I was talking. So I stopped talking. When they noticed, I said, ‘I have so much to say to you, I’m going to stop talking until you’re finished. My message got across. It was like heaven.”
In September 1984, she arrived at St. John’s … and didn’t know what to do with her new school. The kids were in their classrooms, the teachers were busy teaching. It was the first time in decades she didn’t have a classroom of her own. She turned to her office manager, Vinnie DeLeo, and said, “What do I do now?”
“It was a lonely feeling,” she recalled. “But we had a good laugh.”
Eventually she bonded with the entire school, by visiting the classrooms, remembering the students’ names, and telling everyone that when they passed her Iin the hallway, to say hello. She told them, “I really like to be spoken to, don’t just walk by in the hall. And remember all the teachers you had, don’t just say goodbye and move onto the next classroom.”
But she nearly had to say goodbye to the school, which was in the red when she first arrived.
“The school was on its way out, it was on the verge of closing,” said Innocenti. “At one point, she had to borrow money from her mother to buy a roll of stamps.”
The school still had two eighth grades but was transitioning to single classrooms. And while they were taking in the students from the closing of nearby St. Anthony’s and St. Mary’s schools, there was an exodus of North End families moving to Medford, Revere, and other area communities that offered bigger homes for growing families. St. John’s had dropped from a high of 225 students down to 135, and many families weren’t applying because of the very real danger that it would also be closing. “If you don’t have students, you don’t have a school, and tuition covers teachers’ salaries,” she said.
So Sister Eileen organized a meeting with parents to save the school. She told them, ‘This is not my school, it’s our school, it’s your children’s school. If you’re not going to work with me, I’m not staying. But if you promise me you’ll work with me, I’ll stay.” The parents responded, “’Sister, we want this school more than anything.’”
The parents launched a grassroots marketing campaign: they targeting the South End, which didn’t have a parochial school; they reminded East Boston that it was just a five-minute trip through the tunnel. They reminded Charlestown, which lost their parochial school, that the North End was just a walk over the bridge. Workers at MGH and the State House and City Hall who wanted their kids close by began to consider St. John’s.
“We’re kind of tucked away here,” said Sister Eileen. “Parents would say, ‘We didn’t know you were here.’ Thank God for technology, people use our website and learned more about us. The money we put into the website is paying off.”
And Sister Eileen balanced the books. DeLeo noticed a huge difference in the way the school was run. “She was more of an administrator,” DeLeo said. “She was starting to make things happen for the school. She started a bingo every Wednesday, began the May Fair, we had something going on every night. After the first year, we were cleared. It was the last year we had a deficit.”
The numbers started growing. At one point, one of the board members promised to take Sister Eileen to the Ritz if they got their numbers up to 200 students. She had a great meal there, she says happily.
Now she’s looking to expand to 250 students. Today, about 40 percent of students are from the neighborhood, and a bus picks up kids from all over Boston, including Beacon Hill, the South End, East Boston, Charlestown, Dorchester and Roxbury. The rest come from places that include Winthrop, Revere, Medford, Milton and Tewksbury.
Classes start off with the “thundering 30” in kindergarten, which has a waitlist. “That hasn’t happened for years,” she said. “This is exciting. The parents are doing a great job.”
The classes gradually taper to 20 per class by eighth grade as they lose their brightest Boston kids to Boston Latin. “It’s bittersweet,” she said. “We’re happy that we do such a good job.” She’s trying to figure out how to market the school to parents of grades 2-8. But otherwise, she’s proud of leading a financially sound school supported by a strong group of parents.
As the school prepares for its annual gala, and concludes a year of successful fundraising, its budget is doing well enough that they didn’t have to raise tuition. “I always feel like a beggar,” said Sister Eileen. “A good beggar, but still. My mother said, you can always get a no, but if you get a yes, that’s great.’”
The school also received an anonymous $100,000 for computers and math, and so St. John’s has equipment that isn’t seen in most schools until the high school level. “I don’t believe anyone can replace a teacher,” she said. “But we know children are going into a world filled with technology, and we prepare them. Some children are visual learners, and this helps them, too. We’re such a little school, so we’re not doing so bad.”
Not that she wants to be in competition with other schools, but still… “Our values should be the same like other schools. But our mission, our religious values, are to celebrate God here. Hopefully there’s a God present in this building. I like to think of St. John’s as holy ground. When people come to register, I love that they say ‘There’s a feeling I get that does my heart good.’ We get so used to it. I go to other schools and try to compare, and I’m always happy to come back to St. John’s.”
She also gets help from the Catholic Schools Foundation, a group of businesspeople who support a parochial education. It contributed money toward scholarships and marketing, including a snazzy new brochure that promotes the school’s programs such as art, music, Italian classes, Girl Scouts, extended day program, computer classes, summer reading program, physical education, volunteer opportunities, and even yoga classes for kids and parents. The school is fully accredited by the Archdiocese of Boston and the New England Schools and Colleges.
This month, Sister Eileen celebrated 54 years with the Sisters of St. Joseph, and her 72nd birthday. “Someone asked me, ‘You’ve been here for 25 years, haven’t you done it all?’ and I said, ‘I’m just beginning.’”
She has as a role model in Sister Tarbula, an ancient but beloved nun who taught math and other subjects until she was so bent over with arthritis the kids had to tie her shoes for her. “Kids who are 30 come in and ask about Sister Tarbula. Math was her baby. She’d bang it in and bang it in to her students. She had a heart of gold, but she made sure she got ever kid into high school.”
When Sister Tarbula broke her arm, she retired. When Sister Eileen visited her in the retirement home, Sister Tarbula would tell her “Never leave the North End, stay there forever, they need you.’” She has no intention of leaving. And since Sister Eileen is vibrant and healthy, it looks like she’ll stay a while.
However, one day she was out with a bad cough, and when she returned, a student told her that the school wasn’t the same without her. Her heart was warmed, but she was skeptical. “I asked him what was so different? Half the time I’m in my office or running around. And he said, ‘When you’re in the building, I always feel safe.’ That made my day. It’s little things like that that really touch you, not the 25 years. It’s the little ones that just give you a hug, that’s spontaneous. The love we show. The 25 years here flew by, I don’t know where the years have gone.”
Still, people ask her how long she plans to stay. “I tell them I will know the day I need to leave, but I will stay if I have the health,” she said. “I wish I had another 25 years here, but I’ll always be watching over St. John’s.”
By Sandra Miller
