July 15, 2009

Loyola School: educating and evangelizing the Denver community

By Elizabeth M. DeLine

Since 1924, St. Ignatius Loyola Church has ministered to immigrants in Denver’s inner city. The parish began its ministry when a rush of Italian and Irish settlers moved to Colorado to take hold of new opportunities on the Western frontier.

Today, Loyola continues its mission amid new demographics.

Immigrant families coming from African countries such as Nigeria, Uganda and the Sudan, are settling in around the historic red-brick parish to send their children to its grade school, which provides an excellent academic environment along with a solid Christian moral atmosphere for the children.

The small school, offering grades kindergarten through sixth, is the only primarily African-American Catholic school in Denver. 

Although more than 70 percent of the students and their families are not Catholic, there is no hesitation for the Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati, under the leadership of longtime principal Sister Mary Ellen Roach, along with the Jesuit priests who run the school and parish, to employ a faith-based curriculum.

“Loyola has a dual mission,” said Father Thomas Jost, pastor of Loyola for the past 12 years. “First, to provide a solid, Catholic education to parishioners and their families and secondly, to provide African-American families a unique alternative to the public schools that are in the area.”

Where many schools focus on academics or on security in the environment, Loyola, while offering both, also gives students an opportunity to know Christ and the Gospel message.  That it is successful doing so comes across in conversations with its students.

“The best part of Loyola is learning about Jesus Christ,” asserted third-grader David Acevedo, 7. “I like to learn about him so that I can teach my younger brother about him.”

Loyola sixth-grader Kendra Johnson, 11, agreed.

“I love my school because of the teachers and what they teach,” she said enthusiastically. “It is wonderful!”

Because Loyola only goes up to sixth grade, many of the students go on to Blessed Sacrament School for the seventh and eighth grades. 

Looking at scores from the Iowa Basic Skills exams, Father Jost explained that a majority of the students arriving to Loyola are behind academically. 

But through the hard work of the teachers, the children begin catching up by the third grade. By the time they reach the fifth and sixth grades, they excel to the top of the charts.

In the blue-painted library lined with books, inspirational sayings from Mother Teresa and other saints are stenciled onto the walls.  Asked what the most important thing he has learned at Loyola School is, fifth-grader Anthony White pointed to the aphorism on the library door: “Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.” 

Community members said that would be only one of the lessons a student would take away with them after leaving Loyola. 

The most important one, said Father Jost, is the knowledge that they are children of God.

“Sensing they are part of the family of God and that their classmates and everyone in the world also shares that same inheritance,” he said. “This is the primary Christian vision which we strive to instill in our students.”

Proud of the strong Christian identity Loyola imparts to its students, Father Jost described the venerable school as “an evangelization outreach to the community.”