By Tom Tracy - Florida Catholic

This is the fourth and final installment in a series about Monroe County parishes and the work of Catholic Charities in the Florida Keys. 

KEY WEST | If Catholic school enrollment is any kind of barometer of a community, then Key West was rebounding fairly well from 2017’s Hurricane Irma and its Category 4-related damage.

The Basilica School of St. Mary Star of the Sea, which served as a temporary community day care center immediately following the storm, is reporting its strongest enrollment in the school’s 150-year history, with 320 students enrolled and another 80 youngsters on a waiting list. 

Almost all the students and their families had evacuated Key West in advance of Irma’s September landfall, and most returned with just a few exceptions. Only one or two faculty members ultimately didn’t return, according to Robert Wright, the school’s principal.  

He remembers the year of Irma as “truly one of my favorite years” in terms of his experiences in Key West. “That is because you were able to witness the selflessness of people” as they put their lives on hold to help each other and the community, said Wright, a father of six with three enrolled at the Basilica school. 

“It was humbling to be in the position of need when so often we’re in a position to give. It did however provide us an opportunity to educate the children on gratitude and to teach them that there are times in life when you may be in a position to give and times when you may need to receive,” Wright said. 

He noted that the Basilica school is effectively the largest ministry of St. Mary Star of the Sea Parish, which partly subsidizes the school. Its pastor, Father John Baker, maintains a close relationship with the school community and staff. 

“Father Baker and I talk daily — his support of the school is tremendous and for him it’s not just an academic institution a block down the road, but rather an active ministry, communicating Christ to the world,” Wright said. “We ought to be doing that if we are a ministry.”

Hurricane Irma left the Basilica school with some $860,000 in damages. The auditorium suffered severe roofing and water damage. Irma’s sea spray and wind also damaged the paint on a new building that was then under construction. 

HELPING OTHERS

After the storm, Wright offered the school space as a part-time day care center and safe space for local families who needed emergency day care for their children. 

“We are here to take care of each other and you saw that lived out completely after the hurricane,’’ he said. “I do believe tourism has rebounded” and enrollment trends would support that recovery, he added — although the coronavirus pandemic has once again hit the service and tourist industry hard.

Last year, the Basilica school students along with the local Knights of Columbus raised some $10,000 in donations for Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of Nassau following the devastation of 2019’s Hurricane Dorian in the northern Bahamas. 

Moreover, the regional response, coordination and investment of personnel and material resources from Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Miami was “edifying,” and an indication of a growing parish-Catholic Charities collaboration, according to Father Baker. 

The priest met a visiting delegation of Catholic Charities board members touring Monroe County toward the end of last year. Catholic Charities of Miami is in the process of building its new St. Bede’s Village workforce housing facility for Monroe County, expected to be completed as early as this fall. 

The St. Bede's facility currently has 10 units of affordable housing but an additional 37 new units are in the works at the new site, as a Church response to the regional housing crisis in Monroe County. 

 

AFFORDABLE HOUSING

“The project has captured the imagination of many because throughout the Keys there is a challenge of affordable housing,” Father Baker said. “Whenever anybody has been in need, I refer them to the Catholic Charities office here and they are taken care of and are grateful. The word gets around.”

Patrice Schwermer, the Key West-based outreach coordinator for Catholic Charities in Monroe County, said she is struck by how many needy people she encounters who are temporarily living in a substandard situation. 

“It amazes me how we get a lot of people who are living in their car maybe because they lost a job or because other things happen,” Schwermer said. “When they come to us, we can help pay late rent to prevent them from losing their house or help with first and last month’s rent to help them get into a place — but finding a place is really hard sometimes.”

Another housing program that Catholic Charities offers is the St. Theresa Apartments, two different apartments on different properties leased through the city of Key West at the rate of a dollar a year. 

It was an idea based on some visionary civic leadership in the 1990s, according to Megan Hull, program director for Catholic Charities Key West. 

“They made a deal where all these agencies including Catholic Charities could all utilize this old Navy housing turned over to the city,” Hull said.

Collecting data on the local homeless population is also key.  

“We use that data to determine what our demographic is, who are our homeless people and how do we best address their needs in the community,” Hull said, noting a wide array of grant funding goes into supporting the Catholic Charities housing efforts in Monroe County. 

With a high degree of worker transiency, the housing market in the Keys is financially very demanding on renters. 

“There is a lot of turnover and a lot of mistrust among landlords, who want first, last and security (deposits),” Hull said, often amounting to over $6,000 in move-in costs. Charities is able to help with some of those move in costs through financial aid assistance programs and rental referrals.

 

PARISH FOOD PANTRY

Deacon Peter Batty, a local businessman who helps with the food pantry at Mary Star of the Sea Parish, said before the coronavirus struck, the unemployment rate in Key West was about negative two. “There are jobs for these people, but we are five to seven thousand housing units short and we have no room to build,” he said. 

The parish food pantry (built with the financial support of Catholic Charities) and a separate parish-sponsored SOS Foundation Star of the Sea Mission on nearby Stock Island are helping supply food for hungry families in the area, including those who say at the Keys Overnight Temporary Shelter (Kots), a community project created with the support of local law enforcement in Key West. 

“We are providing about 1,000 meals a week which is huge and in all honesty it couldn’t be done without the cooperation between the parish and Catholic Charities,” Deacon Batty said of the parish food pantry. “We do certainly have homeless but we have alternative, good treatment for the homeless so the homelessness issues in Key West are not as significant as they could be.”

Catholic Charities Board member and Miami resident Craig Armstrong, a CPA, said he was inspired by the thoroughgoing nature of community and civic collaboration in Key West. 

“It is a story that is so nice to hear in terms of the relationship between Catholic Charities, the parish, the city, the county — if everybody kind of works together then the goals and solutions can be met. But we don't hear that very often,” Armstrong said. “It is give-and-take amongst everybody and that is good to hear.”

Father Baker pointed out another blessing that St. Mary Star of the Sea Parish has been able to provide: an annual summer camp for youths. 

“We have children on our property 51 weeks of the year. The summer camp had 270 kids this summer — a lot who are not even part of the parish,” Father Baker said. “It is a very well-run summer camp for parents who are looking for a good healthy place for their children and it's fairly priced. The needs are huge because families here work.”

Corrected April 28, 2020: Patrice Schwermer's job title was incorrect in the original story. She is outreach coordinator for Catholic Charities in Monroe County. The program director for Catholic Charities in Monroe County is Meagan Hull. The portion of the article in which Hull is mentioned was inadvertently left out of the story when it was initially posted.