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BY PRISCILLA GREEAR
Staff Writer
ATLANTA--Carlas Smith attended Our Lady of Lourdes School from 1978-83. She
fondly remembers learning African-American hymns and history and going to
weekly Mass wondering, as some children do, why she was there.
Now 28, Smith knows the answer and has come to value the education at the
school on Boulevard near the Martin Luther King Center, where she and a brother
and sister went to school and where another sister, Brittany, is now a
fourth-grader.
This spirit of gratitude has led her and other OLL graduates like Kathleen
Bertrand to send their own children to their alma mater. The archdiocesan
school was founded in 1920 and staffed for 60 years by Sisters of the Blessed
Sacrament.
“As you grow up you learn to appreciate it--the strong foundation of
faith. It’s like a part of a family. They take care of you educationally,
spiritually and physically. It’s just well-rounded,” Smith said.
Smith, whose son, Malcom, is in kindergarten, said the curriculum is even
stronger now than when she attended, as the school has been renovated, has a
new library with a much larger book selection, new computer room and more after
school programs such as the Boy and Girl Scouts. Malcom swims twice weekly with
a program at the King Natatorium across the street.
She believes the teachers are excellent and highly dedicated. Her son’s
kindergarten teacher challenges students gently to do things for themselves and
disciplines well, teaching them to respect people and pay attention, Smith
said.
“When he first started he (would) come and say, ‘This is the
school my mommy went to,’” she repeated, with a mother’s love.
A member of Our Lady of Lourdes Parish, Smith said the faith she acquired
there sustains her as a single parent.
“It plays a major part for me. It taught me to be God-fearing and to
respect everything that God has done for us as a people. It plays a major role
as a single parent.”
She added that she was the only female member of the first sixth-grade
basketball team, before winning a scholarship to play at St. Pius X High
School, Atlanta.
Bertrand, who attended Lourdes from 1957-65, has two brothers who also were
students there and two sons, Ikechi and Amichi, who graduated from the school
to become honor roll students. Her twin daughters, Chinela and Chioma, are
sixth-graders.
She likes “the equal emphasis on good quality education and good
quality living and that comes from the religious base of the education.”
Now vice president of membership and community affairs for the Atlanta
Convention and Visitors Bureau, for which she is a frequent public speaker,
Bertrand joyfully recalls making her debut in the lead role of a third-grade
play.
“That got me on stage and I’ve been public speaking ever
since,” she said.
Also a professional singer, Bertrand said she loved hearing Gregorian chant
at Latin Mass and sang a chant in concert last Christmas. She also made her two
best friends in first grade. A Methodist, she said this Catholic foundation has
strengthened her faith.
“I’m very strong spiritually. I’m very spiritually-based. You
keep for life a sense of treating people well, doing the right thing, a sense
of order and discipline and a thirst for quality education because we were led
to believe that our education at Our Lady of Lourdes was the best and we
didn’t stray from that,” she said. “And that’s why I made
the decision to put the girls there.”
Bertrand feels gratitude for the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament who taught
her at the school and whose mission was to serve African-American and Native
American communities.
“I had a sense that they really cared about their mission...They were
very dedicated and very caring people,” she said. “There are still
people there--although they’re not nuns--who really care about the
children.”
She particularly likes how Lourdes now integrates African-American history
into the curriculum and through activities such as observing Kwanzaa. In the
early 1990s she initiated a three-year program bringing story tellers, zoo
animals, scientists and other speakers to the school and incorporating field
trips, and said Lourdes continues to offer similar activities and programs.
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