Mercury News Coverage of Loyola

(a guest posting from Stacy Pena, Board member of LAEF)

I wanted to share with you these excerpts from a San Jose Mercury News article:

Parents Give Loyola Real Neighborhood School Feeling

There is something refreshing about finding out that in this frantic commuter-oriented world where everyone is in too much of a hurry to do everything, there still are places like Loyola School. Located in the heart of one of the older residential areas of Los Altos, little Loyola School, built in 1948, is one of those safe and secure neighborhood schools. There is a community feeling which revolves around the school that is hard to define…It’s the kind of school where the kids wear their blue T-shirts with white lettering reading “Loyola School” to class.

The principal is equipped with a very with-it PTA, which generally tries to fill in where diminishing Los Altos School District funds have left holes in the school programs….the PTA principal said “Primarily, what we have at Loyola is a very forward-thinking principal, a very positive person willing to make changes. We had been in a situation where we didn’t have the options for some of the fundraising things we now can do. Now we do.”

There is a philosophy at Loyola that what the school district cannot afford, parents may very well be able to provide.

“It’s fun to be involved at a school where people put out their own effort,” said the PTA president.

***
Surprised you didn’t see this article in the Merc? That’s because it ran on October 13, 1976 (2 years before Prop 13 took effect!). My mom just gave me the clipping, which she had saved all these years because she was a proud Loyola parent. I was in 5th grade at the time; Dick Liewer (father of Junior Olympics) was the new principal.

Yes, things have changed in 34 years, but not as much as we sometimes think. Instead of despairing over what the district cannot afford, let’s celebrate what we have, and do what we parents have always done, and that’s to “put out our own effort.” Viva LASD!