It was as startling as seeing a bear swimming in a backyard pool.

Travis Russell, the 40-year-old Jesuit priest who’s president at Verbum Dei High, was carrying around a Craftsman tool box as if he were the school’s handyman. He pulled out a hammer to demonstrate he knows what he’s doing.

“I had to hang up a picture of the new pope,” he said.

It’s all hands on deck at “The Verb,” a beacon of hope for many in South Los Angeles. With an enrollment of 310 students, the all-boys Catholic school in Watts has a tuition of just $4,000, with most families paying $1,200 thanks to assistance from a corporate work study program and other Catholic scholarship funds.

Once a powerhouse in basketball in the 1970s with the likes of Raymond Lewis, David Greenwood and Roy Hamilton, the school canceled i

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