It”™s hotter than you-know-where outside and several dozen youngsters are frolicking on the grass at Pace University”™s Center for Literacy Enrichment on the Pace Law School campus in White Plains. The hose and inflated pool are popular. The youths are there about the serious business of reading, but a little fun never hurts as Sister Mary St. John Delany, the center”™s director, well knows and she stands boldly close to the action.
Inside, she offers the narrative of a life well-lived and heartily engaged.
Sister St. John has been to Antarctica. “We were on an ice-breaker and used Zodiacs (inflatable boats) to go ashore.”
She has seen the midnight sun. “We sipped champagne and watched the dirty reindeer.”
She had an audience with Pope John XXIII. “I think it was the most overwhelming, overpowering thing to experience.”
And she had an audience with Pope John Paul II. “You can”™t explain it. Something overtakes you. It was like my body was moving backward.”
Asked for a rundown of places she has visited, she offers “all the Scandinavian countries, Rome and London many times, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Switzerland, India, Indonesia and Japan three times.”
She taught first grade at St. Bernard”™s in White Plains between1944 and1964; and was principal of St. Anthony”™s in West Harrison-East White Plains from 1964 to 1971. Last St. Patrick”™s Day in White Plains, she marched as an aide to the grand marshal.
She is “immensely interested in history, especially the beginnings of this country ”“ how America began.”
Her love of the past dovetails with teaching children to read, which is her summer vocation. A personal favorite book is Dobbs Ferry author Jean Fritz”™s “Shh! We”™re Writing the Constitution.” “If you read that book, you will never forget how the different men got to Philadelphia and what transpired during that meeting.”
She earned a Ph.D. from Fordham University “on how the Japanese process information.” At 84, she remains a full-time professor of education at Pace University where she teaches two courses in the fall; two in the spring.
She recounts all this while seated quite naturally at a Lilliputian table-and-chair setup, her knees rising to the tabletop. She quickly points out Pace is nonsectarian and her casual garb ”“ a golf shirt over khaki slacks ”“ gives no hint of the religious life she leads. She attends Mass daily, as did her parents, Patricia Collins Delany and John A. Delany Jr.
If her accomplishments warrant praise, even wonderment, she dishes credit to her parents: “The most loving, supportive parents a person could have.” Her only sibling, Joan, died in 1995. She lives in her parents”™ house in White Plains, where, as she puts it, “I love to entertain.”
She also loves to teach and says, “As teachers, we need to be thoroughly imbued with a love for history, or math, or science or whatever the subject might be because that”™s how you get children to love learning about history or any other discipline.”
She graduated from Our Lady of Good Counsel Academy, which now shares its campus with Pace Law School and with The Center for Literacy Enrichment on North Broadway.
The center enrolls 40 to 50 students at a time. Sister St. John calls the success rate since it opened in 1972 “tremendous. We”™ve never had a dissatisfied customer and we have no discipline problems.”
The center”™s staff ”“ “a wonderful group of people” ”“ includes Colleen Haughey, Brenna Docket, Kate Egan, Colleen Lisner, Kara Younkin, Brianna Spinelli, Christopher Keogh, John Sebalos and Jennifer Newman. By way of both example and of dedication, she cites Newman”™s duties: “administration, finances, phones, testing and tutoring. She”™s working now with two little 5-year-olds who are really reading well.”
Though decades removed from her reading students, Sister St. John says, “I learn to be their best friend. Children are tremendously knowledgeable. Go to them with a question and they will lead you to all sorts of sources.” As she strolls among her charges, the good karma between director and student plays out in a dozen broad grins, not a few of them gap-toothed from the recent loss of milk teeth.
“We look at the child as an individual and say, ”˜What does this child need?”™” The goal is simple: “Better readers; independent readers. That”™s what we try to carry on here.”
The four-week reading program costs $950 if the child (4-12 years old) attends the 9 a.m. to noon session and $1,250 if the child stays till 3 p.m. A separate four-day tutorial for grades five through 12 will run Aug. 18-22 titled “How to Write an Essay”; the cost is $250.
Sister St. John said that for all programs “there is a real need for scholarship money” and urged those companies or individuals who can help to call 422-4135.
Citing her love of entertaining, Sister St. John ”“ a member of the order Sisters of the Divine Compassion ”“ hosts the annual Delany family reunion at her Manor Avenue house. The shindig attracts more than 40 Delanys and in 2007 featured a special Mass celebrated by the Rev. Jesse Bolger, a cousin and just-ordained Baltimore diocesan priest. “We have the greatest time,” she says of the get-togethers.
