By Joe Leo
Special to The Voice

When a group of students from Assumption School in San Leandro took on a service project this summer to help out a fellow school in need, little did they know just how far their efforts would branch out, prompting three other schools in the diocese to contribute as well.

Assumption School graduates Dennis Retallick (left) and Niko Wells transport one of the eMac computers donated to St. Cornelius’s computer lab by Moreau Catholic High School in Hayward. PHOTO COURTESY OF JOE LEO

The task at hand was to create a reliable and functioning technology center that the students and teachers at St. Cornelius School in Richmond could use on a daily basis. Due to major technical issues, their computer lab was out of service for the majority of the 2008-09 school year.

It was back in April when I learned of this school’s needs. Principal Shervin Moradi had responded to my web posting about tech equipment being given away at the other school where I work, St. Leo the Great in Oakland.

From there, the idea for a service project went “online,” so to speak.

St. Cornelius is one of four member schools in the Diocese of Oakland’s Catholic Schools Consortium. Each of these urban schools receives support from its parish and surrounding community. Due to location and demographics, however, funds are hard to come by.

With that as the driving force behind the project, I explained the situation and proposed the idea of the computer lab renovation to my students. Without any hesitation, 7th-grade students Alan Ralph and Drew Retallick eagerly signed on for the job along with alums Dennis Retallick and Niko Wells.

They were really inspired by the idea and couldn’t wait to get started. Their enthusiasm and dedication were truly amazing, exemplifying the “call to serve.”

While most kids rather would have spent their vacation playing video games on their computers, these four young volunteers took their computer skills to a whole different level.

After removing the problematic PC hardware and remodeling the lab from the ground up, they used their technology know-how to refurbish (in some cases, completely rebuild), configure, and network 18 Apple iMac computers that were donated to the school, courtesy of former Assumption associate pastor, Father Dana Michaels. Father Michaels had just been assigned as new pastor of St. Barnabas Church in Alameda and discovered that the iMacs were no longer used because of the closure of the parish school.

Work on the project commenced almost immediately after classes let out for the summer, with a site visit on June 16 to assess the job and transporting the donated iMacs on June 23. Scheduled as a two-day project in July, we found ourselves working throughout the vacation, finally completing the task on Aug. 22, a few days shy of the start of the new school year.

While the initial project is complete, work continues. Without an on-site IT person at St. Cornelius, the students and I have volunteered to visit the school one weekend a month to maintain, troubleshoot, and keep the new lab up-to-date.

Just last month, the team went back to St. Cornelius to deliver additional computers from Moreau Catholic High School in Hayward, where Dennis Retallick is a student.

When the head of Moreau’s technology department, Shawna Martin, heard of the project from Retallick — and his wish that “more advanced” computers could have been set up — a quick call was made to Principal Lauren Lek. She agreed with Martin’s suggestion that 16 Apple eMac computers previously slated for e-waste be re-assigned for donation.

This newer equipment was then setup in the lab, replacing the units from St. Barnabas that were relocated into St. Cornelius classrooms.

In addition, St. Patrick School in Rodeo, having upgraded their lab over the summer, recently announced that they will be donating their Apple hardware to St. Cornelius at the end of the month. This newest donation will allow for teachers to have their entire class in the lab at one time.

“I feel really great about my work. It was very unfortunate they didn’t have working computers at their school,” said Wells, a student at Bishop O’Dowd High in Oakland. “Before beginning this project, I thought all schools in the diocese had the same privileges. I came to realize that this wasn’t true.”

To date, over 136 total volunteer hours have been put in to this service project by the Assumption crew, with 29 of those contributed by Wells and 39 by Dennis Retallick alone.

“The school was in need of a major upgrade, so I feel very accomplished,” said Retallick. “It seems that [some] schools within this diocese are in need of more help than I thought, so I will continue to help whenever I can.”

(Joe Leo is technology coordinator at Assumption School in San Leandro and St. Leo the Great School in Oakland.)

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