More than a bus ride separates inner-city, suburban Catholic schools

Published: 2003-12-16

MUNSTER, Ind. (CNS) -- What do the students at St. Dorothy School, on the South Side of Chicago, and the suburban St. Thomas More School in Munster have in common? Quite a bit, it turns out -- including a healthy interest in lunch. In November, when about 270 students from St. Dorothy, most of them African-Americans, took a half-hour bus ride to visit St. Thomas, which serves a predominantly white community, the thing most talked about first was lunch: corn dogs and peaches and pretzels and a choice of white, chocolate or strawberry milk. The next thing they talked about was church. "One thing I noticed about their church -- it was a little more traditional than ours," said Ashley Ambrose, 13, an eighth-grader at St. Dorothy. "They sing more all together, and they sang some of the same songs we sang last year. We switch up a little bit more." Russell Gonzalez, 13, and Mallory McShane, 14, eighth-graders at St. Thomas More, also noticed the difference in the Masses. For Gonzalez, it was the music. "Theirs was more interactive," he said, recalling an earlier visit St. Thomas More students made to St. Dorothy.

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