Thomas Breen photo
St. Martin de Porres Academy President Allison Rivera at community update.
Don’t be fooled: Those towering, late-19th century red brick church buildings at Columbus Avenue and Cedar Street may look abandoned.
But they’re actually home to a thriving faith-based, tuition-free middle school that fully intends on staying in the Hill and building up the block.
That school is St. Martin de Porres Academy (SMPA), a 70-student, fifth through eighth grade private school located in the old Sacred Heart / Saint Peter Catholic School building at 208 Columbus Ave. between Cedar Street and Liberty Street.
On Wednesday night, SMPA President Allison Rivera and Principal Kelly O’Leary held a community meeting in the school’s basement cafeteria to give an update on whom the school serves, what it has accomplished in the 12 years since it moved into the former Catholic Church campus, and how it plans to renovate and maintain its buildings in the years to come. Since moving in, it has acquired its home and purchased two adjoining vacant buildings, one of which it plans to renovate, another of which it plans to raze
“This is where we want to be,” Rivera told the handful of Hill neighbors, SMPA parents and staff who attended on Wednesday. “This is the community we want to serve. We’re permanent. We’re not going anywhere.”
St. Martin de Porres parent Luz Ramos and school principal Kelly O’Leary.
A private school founded by Jesuits but unaffiliated with the Catholic Archdiocese, SMPA started in 2005 as a school for fifth graders on the campus of St. Ann’s Parish in Hamden.
In 2007, the school moved to its current location at 208 Columbus Ave., entered into a 20-year lease wit the Sacred Heart Church, and expanded to teach fifth through eighth graders.
The school is tuition-free, and fundraises its entire $1.7 million annual operating budget every year. All 70 of its students are low-income and qualify for free or reduced lunch. Ninety-eight percent of its students are students of color. And almost their entire student body hails from New Haven, with a few students also coming from West Haven and Derby.
Rivera described the school’s mission as seeking to “break the generational cycle of poverty” by providing a holistic education of religious, arts, music, and traditional academic instruction, all designed to instill students with a “sense of empowerment” and an impetus to realize a “God-given potential” to succeed regardless of their economic background.
St. Martin de Porres Academy at 208 Columbus Ave.
In addition to providing 10-hour school days, five days a week, 11 months a year for its fifth-through-eighth graders, Rivera said, the school also makes as 12-year commitment to each student, providing financial, tutoring, travel, and even emotional assistance to graduates as they work through high school and college after SMPA.
All in all, she said, the school currently supports and is connected to 224 young people, 70 of whom are currently in the fifth-through-eighth grade Columbus Avenue school and the remaining who have graduated but still look to SMPA for some kind of help in high school and college.
“It’s like a family,” Rivera said about SMPA.
Shuttered former Sacred Heart church and convent on Columbus Ave., now owned by SMPA.
In July 2017, Rivera said, SMPA purchased the entire former Sacred Heart campus, including the school building and the adjacent shuttered former church and convent buildings, for $900,000.
SMPA only needed the three-story school building it currently occupies, she said. But in order to buy the school building outright, SMPA needed to purchase the entire square-block-large campus.
That recent purchase has led SMPA to start thinking about what it would like its Hill campus to look like in the years ahead, she told the small audience on Wednesday.
She showed off a few renderings of what the school would like the Columbus Avenue block to look like if SMPA is able to raise the money. Rivera stressed that these designs are very tentative, and that the school is a long way off from having enough money on hand to actually make any of these visions a reality.
“The dream,” she said, “is we want to preserve the church.” She would love to turn that church, which borders Columbus Avenue and Liberty Street, into an active congregation space for students and community members. It could be a theater, a performance space, a chapel, a community room.
SMPA would like to knock down the old convent building in between the school and the church, she said, and move its street-level parking to border Columbus Avenue, and then build out a soccer and field hockey field and a new basketball court behind the school.
Within the school building itself, she said, she would like to add an elevator and a new HVAC system.
While those dreams may still be a bit distant, she said, “we want to say, we’re going to do something. We’re going to be good stewards” of the property.
Luz Ramos, a Hill resident and parent of a SMPA graduate, attended Wednesday night’s community meeting and praised the school for instilling in her daughter a sense of personal, social, and academic confidence.
“She used to be very shy and quiet,” she said about her daughter, who graduated from SMPA 10 years ago and now attends Quinnipiac University, where she studies robotics and serves on the Student Programming Board. “She really enjoyed her four years here.”
Ramos said that SMPA helps her family cover the $500 annual residential fee for her daughter to live on campus at Quinnipiac. The school also helps her fill out FAFSA forms for her daughter’s financial aid.
“We’re a thriving school,” Rivera said. “We’re still open for business.”
SMPA is currently accepting applications for rising fifth and sixth grade students for next school year. Go to its website to learn more.
Unfortunately, this is one of the best-kept secrets in New Haven and more people should know about them and their amazing work. These people are doing phenomenal work with their students and every day they smash the myth and bias that poor kids cannot learn. SMPA is worthy of our support because their results are real. I have three younger cousins who all graduated SMPA and each has either graduated college or is about to graduate. Instead of fighting over charter schools, we should be figuring out how to scale SMPA so they can educate and form more of our young people.