St. John the Baptist School, Kalihi, teacher Amanda Mosler goes over a history essay with seventh grader Julien Padovani-Baltazar. (HCH Photo | Anna Weaver)
By Anna Weaver
Hawaii Catholic Herald
During a recent morning social studies class at St. John the Baptist School in Kalihi, teacher Amanda Mosler and her seventh graders were wrapping up an American Revolution scavenger hunt. Loyalists and patriots battled it out to be the first to solve the last clue in the game.
It didn’t take long for the patriots to spot the final item under a flag hanging above a class board. Mosler laughed at her students’ enthusiasm as she tallied up each side’s total points with the patriots eking out a narrow victory.
“She’s really nice. She’s the best history teacher,” said seventh grader Julien Padovani-Baltazar. “She helps you a lot. Even though it doesn’t seem like I need her advice, she comes up and checks on me.”
“Ms. Mosler is easy to ask for help,” he added.
In fact, Mosler, a first-year teacher, wants to help her St. John the Baptist students so much that when she heard some of them didn’t know if they could afford the small Catholic school next year, she wanted to do something.
“We’re a smaller community, we’re in the heart of Kalihi, and a lot of our kids are coming out of public housing,” said the school’s principal Carol Chong. “We have some really down-to-earth kids from this Kalihi neighborhood, and they have grown on her.”
There are 110 students in grades pre-K through 8 at the almost 60-year-old school. About 20 percent of students receive scholarships. At $7,000 a year, the school’s tuition is one of the more affordable Catholic school tuitions in the state. But it will rise about 5 percent next year to cover school costs, Chong said, and there are also fees on top of that. It can be a reach for some families financially.
So when Mosler went home to California over the Christmas break, she made pulpit announcements at weekend Masses at her church, Ascension Parish in San Diego.
She shared about her students and her teaching at the Kalihi school and handed out Chong’s annual letter with self-addressed donation envelopes. She also had a display table outside of the church with photos of St. John the Baptist students.
The church’s response was resoundingly positive. Ascension parishioners gave over $7,000 toward St. John the Baptist student scholarships.
Messages came with the donations saying “Your story really touched us” and “Your kids sound amazing. We hope this will help them stay at the school.”
To thank the donors, St. John the Baptist students created a “lei of aloha and gratitude” with thank you notes they mailed to San Diego.
“All this from this little parish in San Diego helping a school like ours with no connection except for Ms. Mosler,” Chong said.
Amanda Mosler leads a discussion in her junior high history class. (HCH Photo | Anna Weaver)
Putting her through her PACEs
Mosler, 22, got her undergraduate degree from the University of California-Berkeley and is on her first of two years teaching through the Pacific Alliance for Catholic Education. After two years working in underserved Catholic schools, plus three summers’ worth of studies and a final third-year of coursework at the University of Portland, Mosler will earn a Master of Arts in teaching degree.
There are seven other PACE teachers in Hawaii, with two other teachers also at St. John the Baptist. PACE is in Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, Utah and Washington state.
“I think they pick people who are very passionate and care a lot about Catholic education and helping out these schools that need us,” she said.
As part of PACE, Mosler lives in community with other local PACE teachers and has weekly fellowship and spiritual enrichment with the whole Hawaii PACE group. She takes online classes toward her education master’s degree on top of her St. John the Baptist work, which includes teaching Spanish and P.E. and having sixth-grade homeroom besides teaching history.
“A lot of days I’m like, ‘I need another cup of coffee,’” she said with a laugh.
But she does bring a youthful (caffeinated) enthusiasm and approach to her lessons.
On the day the Herald visited her classroom, Mosler had her eighth graders looking for ways that the constitutional amendments applied to their lives. When she brought up the Treaty of Paris from an earlier lesson she called it a “throwback.” There were “amendment memes” on a bulletin board. The kids have made breakup videos for Britain for their Declaration of Independence studies.
“She asks us what we want to learn and plans activities based in part on that,” said eighth grader Rayanne James.
Mosler kept up a confident, conversational teaching style in her lessons. “Fantastic!” “Just do your best” and high-fives were employed as she moved between students working on American Revolution essays.
(HCH Photo | Anna Weaver)
Reconnecting to Catholicism
Mosler and her younger sister were raised Catholic. While she went to public school, she sees now what a benefit Catholic schools can be as well.
“These kids are so tied to each other, they’re tied to their faith, they’re tied to their teachers just in ways that you don’t get to have at a public school,” she said. “It fosters amazing values.”
“When you’re raised in this setting, you see those things firsthand, and you’re hopefully experiencing it with your teachers, the school and each other, and it inspires and grows your faith.”
Mosler says she wanted to do PACE in part because she was looking to reconnect to her Catholicism, which she had started feeling jaded toward in high school.
“I wasn’t as convinced that I needed to be a part of the Catholic Church,” she said. But her senior year at UC-Berkeley, she started going to Mass regularly again.
“I think that when you’re in a Catholic school setting you are surrounded by religion and you don’t have those doubts as much,” Mosler said. “And if you do have doubts, you have people to back you up.”
“I see religion so much in Hawaii, hiking and spending time outside of the weekends,” she said. “Being a first-year teacher is hard. And I think that Hawaii has helped in a lot of ways.”
She’s looking forward to coming back to the school of 110 students for her second year of teaching and getting to know the students even better.
