St. Peter Claver Catholic School students
Sarah Jackson is the City Connects Coordinator at the St. Peter Claver Catholic School in the Rondo neighborhood of St. Paul, Minn., which puts her in the stream of part of the city’s African American history.
In 1950, the local parish built St. Peter Claver to serve black families. Back then, Rondo was where most of the city’s black residents lived. And the school was run by a group of black nuns, the Oblate Sisters of Providence from Baltimore, Maryland.
“The Rondo neighborhood was a historically thriving black community,” Jackson says. “Then it was disrupted by the construction of Highway 94.” Construction on the new interstate was approved in 1956 and completed in the 1960s. The project closed businesses and forced hundreds of families to move out of Rondo. Across the country, highway construction had a similar effect on other black neighborhoods.
St. Peter Claver School felt the impact. By 1989, the school closed due to “lack of funding and low enrollment.” It reopened “in 2001 and became a founding partner of Ascension Catholic Academy in 2016.”
Today, 98 percent of the school’s 90 students are black and come from all over the city.
“It’s one of the few schools that kids can go to where they’re not the minority. It’s a place where students can be themselves and feel comfortable and thrive,” Jackson says. “It’s a big family, and the community that kids build here is pretty awesome.”
As all City Connects Coordinators do, Jackson is working with community partners who can meet her students’ needs and build on their strengths. This includes coping with the aftermath of pandemic and helping students get back to grade-level performance as well as getting through the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, which took place in nearby Minneapolis.
“As someone who is white, I can — and a lot of us can — retreat into not thinking about George Floyd or into putting what happened into the past,” Jackson says. “But for our kids, this is still a reality.”
Acknowledging this reality is work that’s being done in many City Connects schools in Minnesota. In each of these schools, coordinators are working with local community partners who are attuned to students and families.
“One partnership we have is with an organization called Black Girl Advocate,” Jackson explains.
“It was started by a young woman named Shamaria Jordan, who actually works in the Minneapolis Public Schools but has a heart for mentorship. She creates safe places in schools for black girls to talk about the black experience.”
Jordan visits the school weekly and meets with middle school girls in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. Conversations touch on academics, relationships with peers, and family life. Two key goals are to create a “path of purpose” and to help the girls realize that they have unique gifts that they can use to serve and to lead.
Another new community partner for St. Peter Claver School is St. Paul Promise Neighborhood, which is housed at the nearby Amherst H. Wilder Foundation.
“Promise Neighborhood partners with families,” Jackson explains. “Twice a week, the organization sends a family coach to the school to help with out-of-school needs such as food insecurity or help with housing.”
“Supporting families is crucial. As I think about my experience with the four domains of City Connects,” Jackson says, referring to the academic, social emotional, physical health, and family domains, “it seems like challenges in the family domain can be the hardest to handle. So having an organization that works directly with families is really exciting.”
Working with families is also easier thanks to the school’s close-knit community. When Jackson conducts whole class reviews, she can go into more depth. And strong relationships within the school make it easier to know who might have a need they’re not sharing, and easier to reach out and say, There’s this opportunity, what do you think?
Because challenges at school can reflect challenges at home, Jackson says, “Any supports that can uplift families and help them thrive so they can be less stressed and be more involved in their children’s education is so important.”
Supporting students and families nourishes the larger St. Peter Claver Catholic School community, where some students have older relatives who also attended the school.
“There’s a very rich history here” Jackson says.
Protecting this history — and extending it — as Jackson helps to do, ensures that today’s students have the support they need today to be successful in the future.
