St. Peters

My early formative years were spent attending a parochial school. And it shaped the person I am today.?

It was a 4-room schoolhouse with three teachers and about 120 students on Milwaukee’s south side. Give or take a kid or two.?

Next door was the Ladies Aide building where we would practice choir, rehearse plays, and attend Catechism classes when the congregation's women weren’t planning bake sales and fundraisers.??

Directly across the street was St. Peter’s Evangelical Lutheran Church.?

It is an 1855 Victorian gothic-inspired place of worship with all the classic themes of absolution, guilt, and condemnation.

It had spires on top of towers and gables with stoneworks of crosses.?

18th Century Christ without all the forgiveness. Dark with a hint of redemption.

And a lot of stained glass of Jesus, Mary, and the Disciples.??

As part of the Wisconsin Synod branch of Lutheranism, it was the one-stop shop for the working poor of the community.

Christ, communion, and a chocolate chip cookie.?

The cookie was only if you were lucky. And that was because cookies cost money and the Sunday tithe was dwindling as quickly as the congregation.?

Christ before cookies.?

And like any other poor community, the church was a part of the neighborhood, even if it was for only one day of the week.?

Milwaukee’s southside had its share of churches. Hell, all of Milwaukee has one dotted on every city block.

Between taverns and churches, that was the only release most of the families had growing up.?

A sip of wine on Sunday and a 12-pack throughout the week. You couldn’t ask for better.?

In hindsight, attending St. Peters was one of the greatest gifts my parents afforded me. Because the truth of it was, they couldn’t afford much.?

Now to put this into perspective, we all were a large neighborhood of a mixed group of abject poverty that were allowed to go to a school, that for what it’s worth, couldn’t even afford to keep its lights on.?

Tuition for half of a semester was close to 400 bucks, which would have been about 1800 dollars by today's inflation.?

That’s a lot of dough for a family that lived paycheck to paycheck.?

Every morning at exactly 6:45 am every student was standing on the cement stairs of the school house waiting to be let in. Rain or shine, we stood there and waited.?

Once those doors opened, we all cleared the path like the Red Sea and stood against the railings to be let in in a neat orderly manner.

The principal, who taught grades 6-8th, stood watch over us like soldiers filing into the barracks.?

The two other teachers, who were both women, waited for their students by their classroom doors. Each one of us had to be inspected before we could enter.?

Were our shirts tucked in? Did we still have smudges of breakfast still on our faces? Were the dresses on the young ladies below the knee??

We were not allowed to bring anything from home except our textbooks, papers, and pens. No toys, nothing flashy, nothing that would distract us from the day ahead.?

Once seated, we said our morning prayers, recited the Pledge of Allegiance, and started with bible study which only lasted about 30 minutes.

From there, it was all manner of intense education.?

A Christ-inspired curriculum of math, science, history, art, religion, languages, and music.

By the third grade, we were already doing basic algebra and language comprehension with authors like Mark Twain, and memorization of bible passages that were drilled into our brains.?

As I said, each teacher had three grades.

Kindergarten through 2nd. 3rd through 5th, and 6th through 8th. Individual grades, but entire groups taught at the same time.?

So it was normal for 3rd graders to participate in 5th grade math. We all shared an accelerated education no matter what grade level or subject.?

It was expected for 6th graders to give presentations to 2nd graders and vice versa.????????

The strange thing about it was, that there was still this understanding that we were not being taught enough.?

The teachers would comment on how other schools were performing at higher levels than we were, which made us all work that much harder.?

We competed with other private and parochial schools, but we were the poor school that didn’t have the resources some of the larger suburban churches had.??

And because of our poverty, we had more to prove than they did.?

As regimented as all this sounds, at the time I considered this normal. We were all poor kids going to a poor school learning the fundamentals of life.

Our success was a long shot.?

Most of us knew that we would never get out of that neighborhood, and if we did, it was by sheer luck.?

Personally, it was not only a place that taught me right from wrong through the teachings of Christ, geometric shapes, and right angles, but a place that built a solid character inside of me.?

I learned about perseverance by studying Thomas Edison. My love of literature was nurtured by continuous exposure to different authors that surpassed required reading by having book discussions.?

We didn’t only discuss Christ but talked about the beliefs of other major religions and how they shaped history.?

I could write a whole piece on our History classes. They were by far some of my favorite memories there.?

Cultures were topics, as well as different current events. Nothing was off the table. All within reason of course, and biblical teachings.?

In those formative years, I was taught loyalty, compassion, empathy, integrity, and the strength of self-reliance. Most importantly, never stop learning.

When I think back on those years, past the harsh discipline, the cold bagged lunches, and secondhand textbooks, I can’t help but feel a sense of unexpected wonder that I survived at all.?

3 teachers who took the neighborhood children and instilled into them an arsenal of weapons to survive not only childhood but everyday life.?

I wasn’t the best student, and neither was most of my classmates. We still had to deal with the poverty of the neighborhood, and home lives that were traumatic in their own right.?

Something no child should have to experience, but given the opportunity to change all that, I would respectfully decline.?

Going to that school was tough. Then again, life is tough.?

St. Peters prepared me for a world that would do its best to grind me into a pulp without taking any of my feelings or emotions into consideration.

The privilege of going to that school toughened me for what to expect but still kept me soft so that I could still have compassion.?

It gave me a moral compass that will always lead me in the right direction.

I’ve made some shit decisions in my life. I have also made some important ones too.

If it wasn’t for the hard-knock education I received there, who knows what station in life I would have.?

I think somewhere along the line education took a hard left in today’s society.

Beliefs like honor, decency, kindness, and compassion have been left on the side of the road.?

This is why my value system is light-years different than a lot of the people I come across today.?

Not to say that I am better. By all means that is not the case, but St. Peters planted a seed in me that will not die.

Poverty watered that rocky soil, and my formative education was the nutrients I needed to grow.?????????