Archdiocese Pledges $450,000 in Aid to Inner-City Students

Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, standing in a Central City district devastated by last spring’s riots, announced Thursday that the Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archdiocese will raise $450,000 to provide scholarships for 478 students in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.

When added to funds earmarked before the civil unrest, the total to be spent by the archdiocese on inner-city projects will approach $20 million--an amount that officials of Rebuild L.A., the post-riot revitalization group, believe could be the largest commitment by a nonprofit organization to the renewal effort.

The largest project the archdiocese will undertake is an $8.5-million rebuilding of Our Lady of Loretto-Bishop Conaty High School, an all-girls school in the Pico-Union district west of downtown that was demolished two years ago because it failed to meet earthquake safety standards.

Mahony, speaking at a press conference on the campus, said the decision to rebuild, made before the riots, was questioned afterward within the archdiocese. But Mahony said he and others believe rebuilding the school is more important than ever “as a potent symbol of our commitment to the inner city.”

“We believe that we are making a powerful statement of commitment today by being one of the first groups to begin construction of a new educational project here in an area so recently devastated by hopelessness, looting, fires, and a seeming lack of future,” said Mahony, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Los Angeles.

“We have heard the call of Mayor (Tom) Bradley and other leaders to rebuild Los Angeles, to create a new city out of the embers and ashes of the riots of last spring,” Mahony said.

The archdiocese’s total commitment was believed to be “one of the largest if not the largest” by a nonprofit organization, according to Rebuild L.A. Co-chairman Bernard W. Kinsey.

In the nine months since the riots, Rebuild L.A. said it has helped to secure more than $300 million in commitments to the inner city.

The funds to be distributed by the archdiocese include $8 million for 75 elementary schools and parishes in riot-affected and other low-income areas. Plans to raise these funds also preceded the riots.

The archdiocese also will spend $2 million annually on scholarships for 2,300 Catholic school students this year and next year.

Meanwhile, Rebuild L.A. leaders, in a board meeting Thursday, said they will launch a concerted effort to ensure that Congress enacts “enterprise zone” legislation providing incentives for corporations to invest in the inner city. Last year, President Bush vetoed an urban aid package, which contained such incentives.

Rebuild board member Esther Valadez, an affordable-housing specialist, said that if the organization is going to be successful on the legislative front this year it must work in concert with city and state officials and enlist local business leaders to lobby Congress and President Clinton. She said Bradley had pledged to coordinate those efforts.

The Rebuild L.A. board, also announced that it will initiate a public service advertising campaign, featuring Los Angeles residents giving their views on ways to heal the city. Actor Edward James Olmos provides a closing voice-over on the television and radio spots, which began airing this week.

Referring to fears that verdicts in the federal trial of four Los Angeles police officers accused of violating the civil rights of Rodney G. King could set off further violence, some board members expressed concern about the need to show more immediate revitalization successes.

“We need a sense of success by April,” when the retrial is expected to conclude, Rabbi Gary Greenebaum, western regional director of the American Jewish Committee, told fellow board members in the public portion of the meeting, which followed a closed two-hour discussion among the 79-member board. “We need a short-term plan.”

Those sentiments were echoed by UCLA professor Leo F. Estrada.

“Are we prepared to show people things are different enough that if the outcome of the trial isn’t what they want, that they don’t have to go to the streets?” Estrada asked. “That preys on the back of my mind. . . . People go to their local bus stop and they still see burned-down buildings. There isn’t much there so far,” he lamented.

The archdiocese said the timing of Mahony’s announcement had nothing to do with those concerns.

Estrada also said in an interview after the meeting that a Times story in mid-November--revealing that more than one-fourth of the companies that Rebuild L.A. officials said were planning to invest in Los Angeles’ inner city had no such plans--jarred Rebuild L.A. and prompted some changes.

“They got caught exaggerating,” Estrada said. “They’ll never do it again.”