Lourdes High School - Building on Our Heritage

   Contact our group at LHS.Heritage@hotmail.com.  If you have any comments that you would like us to forward to the trustees before we present this petition, please send it to this email address as well.  Revisit this site to see additional information from LHS Heritage as well as from petition signers.

   The decision to move Lourdes High School from its traditional downtown location to an outlying area of Rochester has recently been made by the Board of Trustees of  the Rochester Catholic School System.  This decision has many far-reaching consequences for the future composition of the Lourdes student body, its values and its mission.  There will be the loss of this historic site that has been home to Catholic education for over 100 years!

   We ask that you support our statement to the Rochester Catholic Schools Board of Trustees and also provide your relationship to LHS (alumnus, parent, student, faculty, friend, etc.) as well as further statements of support / rationale for maintaining the downtown location.  Finally we ask you to respond to a question regarding financial support for a downtown location with needed renovation and moderately priced expansion.

   A group of alumni will bring this petition and its supporting statements and photos to the Board of Trustees near the end of the year.  The letter that will be addressed to the the Board can be viewed by the link: letter located below and to the right (highlighted in blue).

   We have attached an editorial recently written by 1974 LHS graduates Rick Lee and Paul Theobald and published by The Rochester Post Bulletin for your review to help bring into focus the main issues involved with the move.
  

By Rick Lee and Paul Theobald 

   We are 1974 graduates of Lourdes High School. We received with sadness, shock and dismay the recent news that our alma mater plans to abandon its historic building and downtown location and move to a new remote site. 

   We have talked with many fellow LHS alumni over the past two weeks, yet none of us can make sense of this enormous decision. We are writing this letter to encourage the Rochester Catholic Schools to reconsider the move, and to consider anew the possibilities of the current site. Should Lourdes move, the financial and community costs will be tremendous, and neither the school nor the neighborhood will ever be the same.

   Let us start with a global argument: On Sept. 2, Pope Benedict addressed hundreds of thousands of Catholic youth in Rome, urging them to save the planet while it still can be saved. Lourdes can best help fulfill the pope's mandate by remaining in place.

   The Council of Educational Facility Planners International (CEFPI) held a conference in Minneapolis last April. One theme was that history and rootedness are key to the quality of schools, along with their relationship with their communities. CEFPI also notes that a regular school that lasts 100 years saves more energy than two 50-year high-energy performance schools.

   Moving to the local level, it is often implied that Lourdes is landlocked by Mayo Clinic, and that Mayo needs Lourdes' land. Lourdes is not "landlocked" so much as it is surrounded by complementary activities and potential partners in education. Saint Marys Hospital, Mayo and Rochester's Catholic community have been close partners for more than 100 years. There are many possibilities for continuing and expanding this creative partnership.

   For example, LHS classrooms are used about 180 days a year for about six hours. During weekends, evenings and summers classrooms could be made available for Mayo health education seminars, therapy programs, etc. In exchange, Lourdes students could make use of Mayo's brand new employee fitness center and other facilities, which are unlikely to be in full use mid-afternoon when athletic teams practice and classes meet.

   The possibilities for shared parking are tremendous, as Mayo's parking demand peaks in summer, when Lourdes is not in session.

   With the move, students will lose many nearby work-study and volunteer opportunities -- e.g., Mayo, Saint Marys, the Ronald MacDonald House, and the Dorothy Day House among others. The present site is also near the public library, Mayo Civic Center, countless part-time employment sites, and most importantly the new University of Minnesota campus.

   Students now have a matchless opportunity to see, participate in and learn from the downtown around them. They will not have that on an isolated suburban campus. Yes, the neighborhood suffers from some poverty and social problems. But should a Catholic institution turn its back and walk away?

   The Rochester Catholic Schools' Web site features a presentation with a "Space Program" identifying what the new school will contain. Significantly, much more space is given over to three gyms and an 800-seat theater than is devoted to all classrooms and academic space.

   Outside, there will be separate fields for football and baseball. This is excessive. Certainly physical education and the performing arts are part of education, but they are not most of education.

   Physically, LHS buildings appear to be essentially in good shape, and there has been much new investment in the past decade. John Marshall and Mayo High Schools' campuses are, on average, older. Are they being demolished? What of centuries-old St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome -- is it used up?

   The $56 million estimate for the new site seems very high for simply replacing a small high school and adding capacity for only 50 more students (more than $1 million per new student space added)! But in reality, $56 million is probably an underestimate: Construction costs have been rising at over 10 percent per year recently due to the global construction boom and soaring prices for steel, concrete and oil. The real cost is likely to top $70 million.

   Thus, from a strictly financial point of view, it is far better to rehabilitate and remodel the existing buildings and site.

   We conclude with the words of another alumnus, Steve Gathje '73: "One of the many values that LHS teaches students is that big shiny new academic and athletic facilities have little or nothing to do with success. In the end it is the people (teachers, coaches, parents, students) who matter. That is where the investment dollars need to go."

Richard Lee is an urban planner and holds teaching and research appointments at the University of California-Berkeley, and San Jose State University. Paul Theobald is a scholar and expert on the history of education in the United States. He is the Woods Beals Professor of Urban and Rural Education at the State University of New York-Buffalo.