Rebuilding
Last week, after a two-year journey of healing and rebirth, Our Mother of Consolation Parish School in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, reopened its doors.
Two years ago, a devastating fire burned the school’s interior, forcing students and faculty to relocate temporarily to Chestnut Hill College while plans were made and rebuilding took place. With gratitude to generous parishioners, the local community, large donors, and cost coverage from insurance, the $17.5 million renovation was completed this summer. The newly reimagined school opened its doors and welcomed its students and staff home in time for the new school year.
Liz Matthew is a parishioner at Our Mother of Consolation and mother of OMC students, shares an insight into how OMC has influenced her family and the wonderful community that is the foundation of OMC School.
Watch coverage of the dedication here.
Six years ago, in September 2019, my oldest of four children, began pre-k at Our Mother of Consolation Parish School (OMC) in Philadelphia, a community adminstered by the Oblates since 1998. t. I well remember how, as the weeks passed that fall, I felt more joyfully at peace each day as my son ran off to play in the picturesque school yard with his new friends. My husband and I had made a good choice, we thought, with this warm little school and its familial, diverse community. Here, our son would grow in academic skills and knowledge. Even more importantly, he would grow in character; he would learn to “live Jesus” through the Salesian spirit of doing daily, practical things with intentionality and love.
In March 2023, when our oldest was in second grade and our second in kindergarten, a fire that started in the attic above the fifth-grade classroom tore through the OMC school building that so many children, like mine, considered a second home.
Amidst overwhelming gratitude that no one was lost or injured in this three-alarm blaze, we parents began to wrap our minds around the reality that we had no school. The roof was gone, and everything inside was destroyed. Teachers lost years—in some cases, decades—of work materials, lesson plans, and libraries.
In those very first days, though, it quickly became apparent to me that we did have a school after all. Our school just didn’t have a building.
The school was, and is, the thoughtful, hard-working parents who planned meet-ups at playgrounds to keep our children with one another and gatherings at homes to make cards for the fire fighterswho had battled those flames and salvaged, nearly unscathed, the frame of the historical building.
The school was, and is, the committed faculty and staff who reassuringly hosted study periods and read-alouds at local libraries, quickly moved all their lessons online, and cheerfully spearheaded the eventual move to Chestnut Hill College, where the Sisters of St. Joseph so kindly gave us a temporary home.
The school was, and is, the exceptional, pastoral leadership of Father John Fisher, OSFS, who truly and tirelessly embodies both the Salesian virtues of humility, gentleness, and compassion and the vision to ensure that they got emblazoned on OMC’s new seal.
The school was, and is, the relentless work, generous patronage, and inspiring ideas of more parents, grandparents, parishioners, and others than I can name here that came together to rebuild our new and vastly improved—and now, finally opened— OMC school building.
The school was, and is, not the old building or the new one—but the recognition that a such an impressive and special physical plant could in fact be built thanks only to the time, talents, and treasure of all who would one day be gathered inside.
My third son, age four, currently attends pre-k at OMC. He plays on that same beautiful school yard in front of that same 19th century stone facade. Behind it, there is now a state-of-the-art 21st century space. For every aspect of this surreal and ongoing blessing, my husband and I are grateful and joyful in a way and to a depth that we could not have imagined six years ago.
It took quite a school to create that building.
Elizabeth Matthew
Parishioner at Our Mother of Consolation
Her sons attend OMC School
Learn more about the Oblates