Stress and distress in southeast Delaware County

At Trainer Borough's "psychic night" of entertainment two months ago, several residents who had their fortunes read left the community center sobbing.

Organizer Marilyn Maher has a hunch why.

"Two refineries are closing. My husband is losing his job. Our taxes are going up," she said. "Hel-lo?"

Strung along the river in southern Delaware County, blue-collar towns like Chester, Marcus Hook, and Trainer once formed the racing heart of the region's shipbuilding industry, which employed tens of thousands at its height during World War II.

In the decades afterward, those communities got to know too well the pain of prosperity gone by.

That doesn't make it any easier now.

The projected March closings of the Sunoco-Marcus Hook and ConocoPhillips refineries, with the direct loss of about 1,500 jobs; the insolvency of the Chester Upland School District; the shuttering in June of a beloved 95-year-old Catholic parochial school - all are ratcheting up the already ingrained stress in these faded industrial towns.

Yvonne Vest, 60, a ConocoPhillips worker with three children in the failing Chester public schools, never had high blood pressure. Now she does.

"I have more worry on me now," she said.

Joe Kistler, 56, of Marcus Hook, a Boeing sheet-metal assembler, has several nieces and nephews who were among about 200 children headed next fall for Holy Saviour-St. John Fisher School in abutting Linwood. But the Archdiocese of Philadelphia will close the school as part of its master plan to preserve parochial education amid declining enrollment and growing debt.

Under a proposed school merger, Kistler's kin will have to travel about four miles north to St. Joseph School in Aston.

The archdiocese, Kistler said, "is asking a lot."

Craig Galante, 44, who in his job at ConocoPhillips turns crude oil to gasoline and diesel, next will try his luck with the barbershop he plans to open in Broomall. Seated in his union's hall in Marcus Hook last week for a severance briefing, he predicted "a ghost town between here and the state of Delaware," along with devastation to the local tax base, when the last good jobs leave town.

Property tax rates in some communities in this part of Delaware County are among the highest in the nation - higher even than New York City.

At the same time, the county is experiencing 7.6 percent unemployment, the worst rate among the four Pennsylvania suburban counties. The city of Chester's rate, 11.8 percent, even outpaces Philadelphia's 10.9 percent.

"We are all quite worried," said Maher, the psychic-night organizer. She manages a dental office, but her husband, a 38-year refinery veteran, will lose his job at ConocoPhillips.

She has circulated petitions seeking federal intervention to avert the plant closings.

"I had quite a few people tell me that if their taxes go up, and Conoco stays closed, they are not going to be able to live here," she said. "They will move to Delaware and rent."

Maher worries about negative "trickle-down" on local businesses, especially luncheonettes near the plants. She fears her hometown will shrink away, "like the coal-mining towns of Western Pennsylvania."

Attempting to push back against so many problems on so many fronts, residents often get demoralized.

"Hope is definitely at its low point here," said Hal Shorey, a Widener University psychology professor with a practice in Chester.

Many of his clients seek therapy for depression, which "is a normal reaction to crappy situations," he said, but the problem is broader.

The collective risk to a community's psyche when its goals are consistently blocked is "learned helplessness," Shorey said, which means "you don't try to escape negative situations. You just sit there and take the negative hits because you don't believe there is anything you can do about it anyway."

Shorey's clients include parents of children in the Chester Upland School District, where bankruptcy threatens a premature end to the school year for its 3,600 pupils.

The district is $20 million in debt, with just $100,000 in its coffers. Gov. Corbett, who blames the district for its own mismanagement, has said there will be no state bailout. A federal court judge Tuesday ordered a $3.2 million cash infusion - an advance on state allocations - to keep the district operating at least a few more weeks.

Late Friday, Corbett and Senate Republican Leader Dominic Pileggi (R., Delaware) issued a joint statement in which they said Chester Upland students would be able to finish the school year in the district. They said they were working on a "responsible, long-term plan" to address financial problems.

The budget crisis had been building for years as increasing numbers of public school students left to attend charter schools, taking per-capita state funding with them.

Sixty-year-old Vest, a lifelong resident of Chester who attended its schools, knows firsthand that life can be unfair. In 2000, her daughter Irene, 33, died of a rare blood disorder. That left Vest to care for Irene's children and see to their education.

"I never expected to raise her children," Vest said. "But she married a bum."

Rearing her grandchildren now - LaVar, 17, Isaiah, 16, and Ericka, 15 - has brought Vest into close contact with the Chester schools, which to her seem undisciplined and lacking the academic standards of her student days.

Even with a high school diploma, Vest had to start as a meat wrapper. Her next job was making labels in a tag factory.

"I was just a teenager trying to find my way," she recalled.

Then, around 21, she took a course in welding, graduated in steel-toe shoes, and landed a $2.36-an-hour job at Sun Shipbuilding & Drydock Co. in 1972. A year later she was laid off.

She found work, at $10 an hour, at the British Petroleum refinery, which eventually became ConocoPhillips.

"It was a big bump in pay," said Vest, who used the added earnings as down payment on a car, and a six-bedroom house in Chester that she bought in 1978. "I had moved up from the bottom of the barrel, to the middle class."

Now, her job as a wastewater-treatment operator is almost certainly coming to an end. Her union, United Steelworkers Local 10-234, has told her to expect a pink slip within two months.

Although she works 12-hour shifts, she keeps abreast of her grandchildren's academic performance, popping in unannounced at their schools. What she sees upsets her. LaVar said that at one he attended, a student swiped a guard's handcuffs and used them to lock a student to a chain-link fence.

Frustrated by the apparent chaos, Vest enrolled the kids at Concord Christian Academy, a private, Baptist-affiliated school in nearby Wilmington. Vest and her daughter-in-law drove the children there every day.

"That was a big chunk of my income, paying for them to go to school," she said. "At the same time, I was paying school taxes in Chester and not getting anything for my school dollar."

In 2008, with LaVar ready to enter ninth grade, Vest reenrolled the children in the Chester Upland district. Since then, she said, the schools have steadily declined.

"Not good," she said. "Not good at all."

The merger last fall of two of the district's three high schools - Smedley Allied Health, and Science and Discovery - has resulted in fights between competing student groups.

At one point, said LaVar, the joint high school had just 17 teachers for about 500 students, and pupils routinely fought over classroom seats and textbooks.

Several times students have walked out and marched in protest to City Hall.

Seeing students milling around on the street one day, Vest confronted a school administrator.

He was angry at the students who walked out, she recalled, and said, "There are consequences to be paid."

Angry herself at the disarray in the schools, Vest shot back: "There are consequences for all of us."

Seated in her dining room on a recent day off from ConocoPhillips, she said she hopes the company finds a buyer, or some other reason not to lay her off.

"It is a mess. I have to worry about finding a job and getting them educated. But I am smart enough to know to prepare myself for the worst," she said.

"I am not too proud to wash a toilet or scrub a floor. As for eating, I know how to stretch a dollar."