The more than 500 students, families, teachers, parishioners, neighbors, friends and community members along with some dogs running in the streets and park near Holy Redeemer Catholic School in Kensington, Maryland, for its annual Cardinal 5K and Half-Mile Fun Run on a Saturday this spring illustrated a key aspect of the school, which this year is marking its 75th anniversary.
“It’s a true neighborhood school,” said John Wasp, who smiled as he ran to the finish line alongside his son Johnny, a third grader at Holy Redeemer School. He added that the race “is great for all ages. I love seeing people from the neighborhood and church.”
Kathryn Wasp, John’s wife, teaches pre-kindergarten at the school, and they also have a daughter Lucy in the first grade there, and a daughter Kinsey who is 2.
“I went to school here. My parents still live right down the hill here… I’m proud to be able to come back,” said Kathryn Wasp, who has taught at Holy Redeemer School for the past four years.
She grew up in Holy Redeemer Parish and was baptized and married there.
“It’s made me want to raise my kids in a similar way with a good education and a strong community,” she said.
Tommy Corrigan, the principal at Holy Redeemer School for the past six years, noted that “over 60 percent of students walk to school. Every day it’s a way the community comes together. Every morning it’s a community builder. You see groups of families walking together to school, and you see the same at dismissal. With the 5K, you see the same thing. Instead of walking to school, we’re running.”
He noted how multiple generations of families, including parents and grandparents, are active in the community and support the school and parish.
After each student crossed the finish line, Corrigan handed them a medal for participating in the race. Some parents jogging in the fun run pushed their children in strollers.
Father John Winslow, a parochial vicar at Holy Redeemer who ran in the 5K, praised the community spirit and faith in that neighborhood. “The Catholic identity and the culture coming together make for a great parish and a great school,” he said.
The annual Cardinal 5K and Half-Mile Fun Run fundraiser and community event, which was held on March 21, is named for the cardinal mascot at Holy Redeemer School. The course for the runners winds through Rock Creek Park and the Rock Creek Highlands neighborhood.
That morning, Caitlin Cannon had four children participating in the fun run and her husband pushing their baby in a stroller for the race. A sound system played rock music to entertain the crowd, and the people there enjoyed refreshments after the race.
Cannon said it was fun “seeing the community come together in a healthy, happy way. It combines the church and school communities. It’s a neighborhood event. It also encourages the kids to be active and get outside.”
Her three oldest children – Ginny, a fourth grader; David, a third grader; and Mae, a kindergarten student -- are attending Holy Redeemer School.
“This is like a family to me outside of my hometown,” said Caitlin Cannon, who is from Cincinnati. “There are generations of families that go here.”
Standing outside Holy Redeemer Church, the parish’s pastor, Father Thomas LaHood, smiled as the race unfolded. This past July, he became pastor of the parish where he grew up. In 1972, he graduated from Holy Redeemer School.
“It grounded me in the faith,” said Father LaHood, who sang in the boys’ choir as a student there. “We still had the sisters here. They were great examples of faith.”
The Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati served at Holy Redeemer School from its opening in 1950 until the early 1980s.
“Now we try to keep our Catholic identity using lay people who are very faithful,” the priest said.
Reflecting on the parish, Father LaHood said, “Nothing has changed physically, the houses, the school, the church. I remember when the church was built in 1962.”
One change, he said, is “now mothers work. In my day, moms stayed home. There’s a lot of balancing going on. Still, kids are kids.”
Noting how Holy Redeemer Church and School are nestled in that Kensington neighborhood, Father LaHood said, “It’s the first parish I’ve seen where kids come to Mass on their scooters.” And on school days, “you have a lot of grandparents bringing their grandchildren to school.”
The multi-generational aspect of the parish and school could be seen in the winner of the 5K race, Paul Chasen, who drove in from Baltimore to participate. The Holy Redeemer auditorium is named for his grandfather, Herbert Young, a father of seven who volunteered for 40 years running a twice-weekly bingo night that raised funds for the school.
The annual race and fun run highlights Holy Redeemer School’s strong community, said Tommy Corrigan, who became principal there in 2020, starting his tenure amid the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I came in with fresh ideas how we could get kids in the door for in-person learning and support online learning,” said Corrigan.
The Holy Redeemer principal grew up attending St. Francis de Sales School in Salisbury on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and he played soccer and earned a degree at Canisius University in Buffalo, New York. He was a Golden Apple Award-winning middle school teacher at Our Lady of Victory School in Washington before coming to Holy Redeemer.
The Catholic identity at the Kensington school “is lived out consistently and constantly,” he said, noting the school Masses every Friday in the church and the all-school rosaries prayed on feast days.
Holy Redeemer students and school families collect food for the Greg Gannon Canned Food Drive and for the SOME (So Others Might Eat) soup kitchen; make sandwiches for Martha’s Table; collect baby items for the Gabriel Project; and hold a toy drive and collect gifts for children and families in need at Christmas time. Holy Redeemer students also visit nearby retirement communities and sing for residents.
The school’s entranceway includes a life-sized cutout image of Pope Leo XIV, along with statues of the Holy Family. Outside the school across the circle driveway, people can pray at a grotto with benches surrounding a statue of Mary tenderly holding baby Jesus.
During interviews at the school, a teacher and two eighth graders reflected on the school’s Catholic identity. For 75 years, Holy Redeemer School has drawn families from the neighborhood and surrounding community together to deepen and share their faith, and sometimes to run around neighboring streets for fun.
Mary Harper – a middle school religion teacher at Holy Redeemer School since 2013 whose four children and her husband attended the school – said she hopes her students learn “just to have a relationship with Christ to continue to help them throughout their lives, (knowing that) you can get through anything with your faith.”
She said the Eucharistic Adoration offered at the parish church “is like a beacon. It grounds the parish.” Once a month, she takes her students to Adoration in the church, where they have quiet time to pray, away from their phones. “They love Adoration… They can connect with God and deepen the relationship,” she said.
A highlight of the year at Holy Redeemer School is the annual Arts Fest in early May, two days where students experience and participate in various art forms led by local artisans, learning things like movie storyboarding, painting in the style of classic artworks, participating in creative activities including improvisational performances and taking cooking classes, and going on field trips to the National Gallery of Art.
Eighth grader Frances Cannon, who has attended Holy Redeemer School since the third grade, said, “I’ve pretty much grown up in this school.” The school is a community where everyone knows each other, she said, adding, “They’re kind of like my family.”
Next year, she will be attending Connelly School of the Holy Child in Potomac, where she is interested in participating in the theater program after acting in school musicals at Holy Redeemer. Reflecting on her Catholic education there, Cannon said, “One thing I’ve learned is I can always turn to Jesus, no matter what.”
Fellow eighth grader Michael Tallamy has attended Holy Redeemer School since pre-kindergarten and lives a two-minute walk away from the school, which he joked means “not having to wake up so early.”
Tallamy, who was wearing a sweatshirt for Gonzaga College High School in Washington, which he will attend this fall on a Presidential Scholarship, said, “I think one thing I’ll never forget about the school is the impact it’s had on my faith.”
He said as a younger student, he felt disconnected from the faith and felt like “I was going through the motions, just worried about myself.” But the school’s religion classes and activities “helped me reconnect with my faith in God,” he said.
Tallamy, who played CYO soccer and basketball there, said, “Even with Holy Redeemer athletics, God is always the highest priority.”
Reflecting on what he had learned from his Catholic education at Holy Redeemer, Tallamy said, “Just having God always being the main focus here implanted that same value in me, and I’ll always take that with me in my life.”
