Down Payments on a Christly Education
Elementary-school-age kids wearing Catholic school uniforms have been hitting up Country Club Plaza visitors for donations. Cynics may be wondering: Are the children filled with genuine school spirit, or did a deadbeat with a lot of kids devise an awesome panhandling scam?
Alas, the children attend a real school: St. Vincent de Paul Academy, which is near 31st and the Paseo.
The students are raising money for their school’s annual jog-a-thon. This year’s event is tentatively scheduled for Thursday at Southeast High School. The children have an hour to run as many laps around a track as they can. “Some of them do amazingly well,” school administrator Jenny Hollinger says. “But they’re young.”
The jog-a-thon is the students’ principal fund-raising activity. In the spring, the adults manage an auction and dinner.
St. Vincent de Paul may sound obscure even to Catholics. The reason is, it is not a part of the diocese. The school and neighboring church of the same name are affiliated with the Society of St. Pius X, a schismatic conservative movement that split with Rome around the time of Vatican II.
The academy has 109 students, according to Hollinger, who is the assistant principal of a new girls-only school for ninth and 10th graders.
The Plaza is the base of operation for some of the city’s most notorius panhandlers. But Hollinger says she hasn’t heard any complaints about the schoolkids sharing sidewalk with the likes of Jerry Mazer, he of the perpetual quest for a down payment on a cheeseburger. Last weekend, a handful of St. Vincent de Paul students raised money on the Plaza under the supervision of Caroline Awerkamp, a third-grade teacher at the academy.
Hollinger suggests that children asking Plaza goers for money is really no different than a trash-bag or candy-bar sale drive. “I don’t think that that would be a foreign sight to Kansas Citians,” she says. – David Martin
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