This year, St. Thomas Aquinas School on Cleveland’s near east side celebrates its 125th anniversary. The vintage building contains classic elements that many Catholic school grads across the country would recognize: high ceilings, the scents of wood and floor polish, hard-working teachers and parents whose firm, warm instructions bounce off the tiled walls. Yet for all the timeless feel, the school’s history is dynamic—and it has powerful lessons to teach those of us who are fans of Cleveland, of urban communities, of Catholic schools, or of all three.
1. Catholic schools’ power to strengthen communities propelled their heyday.
St. Thomas Aquinas parish became the “Irish Cathedral” of Cleveland and helped accelerate the growth of the neighborhood around it. By 1950, it served over 2,000 families, and it spawned the founding of other parishes to meet the growing need. As Notre Dame’s Prof. John McGreevy notes in his study of the Catholic parishes’ impact on the development of American cities—Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North—Catholic congregations built more than churches; they erected schools and housing for religious orders to staff them, which “anchored Catholics to particular neighborhoods” in ways that other denominations did not.
Educational and social offerings as well as religious services ensured that immigrant families and their descendants had a place where they belonged in a new country not always welcoming to newcomers, particularly Catholic ones. Catholic schools in our own day can tap into this historic power by fostering belonging along with knowledge, skills, and faith. Current St. Thomas Principal Rachael Dengler, parents, and the school’s staff are doing just that: offering an expanding number of community activities, like their dad’s group.
In a culture that can be both individualistic and lonely, Catholic schools that act on our beliefs that we are made for each other—that are lives are fullest in community—can offer what few other types of schools can.
2. Catholic institutions played an often-overlooked role in the histories of cities and of striving African-American families.
By the late 1940s, St. Thomas parishioners included not only European-American immigrants and their descendents but African-American families who were part of the Great Migration. The school integrated years before Brown v. Board made segregation unconstitutional, and prominent Black Clevelanders—like insurance company founder M.C. Clarke—joined the parish.
Yet a student can be enrolled without being truly welcomed. As Sr. Dorothy Ann Blatnica, VSC, notes in At the Altar of Their God: African American Catholics in Cleveland, 1922-1961, “The struggle of African American Catholics to become a vital part of the American Catholic Church is as old as the story of slavery in America itself.” Her history of the city’s Black Catholics includes the challenges of families moving into St. Thomas Aquinas to be fully accepted in the school and parish community. M.C. Clarke, for example, was denied entry into the Knights of Columbus. Yet according to former associate pastor Fr. Edward Camille, St. Thomas’s Black families soon “assumed leadership in the parish and became involved in all aspects of parish organization. These same individuals support and foster each other’s personal lives as well.”
Fr. Camille also notes that even as racially driven fights among teenagers broke out in nearby Rockefeller Park, “the parish school became one of the most effective means for the children to become acquainted with those of other races.”
The ideals of our faith can equip Catholic schools to become instruments of building the beloved community, even as we grapple with the same social pressures that all schools experience.
3. American communities are constantly shifting—and our schools must shift too.
In Surrogate Suburbs: Black Upward Mobility and Neighborhood Change in Cleveland, 1900-1980, Georgia Tech Professor Todd Michney traces Black Clevelanders’ migrations up from the south, into zones of Cleveland artificially restricted by racist housing practices, and then out in stages to suburbs. Along the way, he recounts, Black families participated in a vibrant array of civic groups—from informal block clubs to more formal neighborhood associations—and leveraged the power of community relationships to solve problems and advance each others’ interests.
Yet while many longtime St. Thomas parishioners saw new neighbors as fellow churchgoers pursuing the same goals, others saw threats. Indeed, the parish saw a concentrated wave of “blockbusting”—the insidious real estate practice of spreading rumors of growing disorder and impending home sales nearby to get home owners of both races to sell fast and cheap, and then turning around to rent properties at an inflated rate to Black newcomers with limited options due to discriminatory housing practices. In fact, blockbusting in the St. Thomas parish community was so pronounced that Prof McGreevy uses it to exemplify the practice in Parish Boundaries.
St. Thomas pastor Fr. John A Clark, appointed in 1958, fought the practice hard—visiting thousands of living rooms to persuade parishioners to stay. Bishop Floyd Begin encouraged him and others, asserting that “It’s good Catholicism, good Americanism, and just good common sense to work together as good neighbors to make your community and city the best in the world.” But families of both races moved out, and from a high of 2,000 families in 1950, St. Thomas declined so rapidly that by 1975, the church was condemned, demolished, and not rebuilt.
It is intriguing to consider what the American urban landscape would look like today if efforts like Fr. Clark’s and and a core of St. Thomas families had succeeded in maintaining robust, economically and racially diverse parishes in the heart of cities across the country. As we celebrate the powerful community-building of parishes like St. Thomas in their early decades, we must also look to the vacant lot next to the school—where the church once stood—and hear a call coming from its past to build communities a little differently moving forward.
4. Resilience—and redemption—comes from broadening our communities.
Yet St. Thomas Aquinas School has outlasted even the parish that created it. That has happened in large part because St. Thomas persisted in doing what few other neighborhood institutions can: offering a sense of community, anchored in values and shared aspirations, just as it did in a bygone era. Jeff Allen, a dad active in the school’s dads’ group, comments that the school is “becoming a community center”—just as it was founded to be 125 years ago.
That community is welcoming of children of other denominations, and it is not alone. In 1970, just three percent of students in American Catholic schools were not Catholic; now, over twenty percent are non-Catholic. The universal Church has broadly appealing institutions right in neighborhoods that could use them the most, and a wide array of families are seeking them out.
The founder of Partnership Schools in Cleveland, Rich Clark, also brought to the school a wider community of supporters who want to see the neighborhood and the city’s tradition of working-class Catholic schools continue to thrive. And the network is expanding and strengthening ties with more of Cleveland’s exceptional high schools. This expansion of St. Thomas’s community provides what sociologists call both bonding and bridging social capital. Striving to be as energetically welcoming as we are unapologetically Catholic also helps us heed our Gospel call.
5. Public funding for school choice is essential—and insufficient.
In 2020—more than two decades after Cleveland and EdChoice Scholarships put Cleveland in the vanguard of the school choice movement—the announcement went out that St. Thomas Aquinas School was closing, only to be reversed just weeks later when the Diocese announced that the school would stay open and become a Partnership School. The school’s near-closure is a cautionary tale for the growing number of places across the country where parents are now able to access public funding for school choice.
Vouchers, tax credit scholarships, and education savings accounts all offer new possibilities for parents—and Catholic schools. But over thirty percent of Cleveland’s Catholic schools closed after scholarships became available. In part, that’s because the initial funding was insufficient—and still falls far below that of charter and public schools.
Yet schools also need more than state funding to serve students well. In addition to philanthropic investment, new forms of support are vital, particularly to serve students coming to us from other sectors, who may have learning gaps or school culture shifts to navigate. By finding creative ways to provide comprehensive supports like teacher coaching, curriculum guidance, and leadership development to schools like St. Thomas, we can answer one of the critiques of universal school choice: that it benefits the poor less than others. In the process, we can reinvigorate urban Catholic schools, the largest potential source of school choice seats in many low-income communities.
The Good of the Other
St. Thomas Aquinas–the school’s patron saint–defines love as “desiring the good of the other.” In the final analysis, it is love that has helped St. Thomas persevere. Generation after generation of community members have willed the good of other people’s children at the corner of Superior Avenue and East 91st Street. Jeff Allen, St. Thomas dad and volunteer, has said about the students: “They aren’t my kids—but they are all my kids.” If enough of us see the children of St. Clair-Superior and neighborhoods like it the same way Jeff does, then schools like St. Thomas can thrive well into their next century and more.
