Getting Ready: How to Plan a National Bus Tour

Written by: Eric Prister

"What's the precedent?"

"The precedent? The precedent for a 45-city, nation-wide bus tour?"

It's an inside joke that's been told many times over the past few months, usually preceded by a question about a particular event—an event at a school, an event gathering the friends of Catholic education. After nine months of planning, we still fall back to the assumption that we've done this before, and that there must be some precedent for it.

How do you execute something of this scale? Something so clearly out of the ordinary work load? Perhaps it doesn't seem so hard—set some dates, plan a few events, drive everyone there, and celebrate the gift of Catholic schools.

But what if the students won't be in school that day? What if the award winner can't attend? What if our own team's plans change, and we have to change the date?

It's a process filled with questions, and almost always, it's filled with questions no one expected:

"Which school are we visiting in Topeka, Kansas?" (Our Lady of the Fields—but when will the kids come see the bus? Are they going to sign it? Sign it, who said anything about signing the bus?)

"Who's driving the bus today?" (I can—but have you been certified? How many hours have you worked over the past seven days? Is the GPS mounted in the correct position?)

"Where should we hold our reception in the evening?" (O'Malley's sounds nice—but do they have a space that night? When do we need to give them a RSVP total? Will the bus fit in the parking lot? I've never been there before!)

For those of us at ACE, a 45-city, nation-wide national bus tour is something unprecedented, but we do it to celebrate other unprecedented accomplishments.

In 1810, only four years after becoming Catholic, a woman in Baltimore, Maryland began opening schools, run by Catholic nuns, to teach young Catholic children in the area, an unprecedented idea in a fledgling United States of America. She went on to found a religious order of sisters dedicated to serving children of the poor, and began the parochial school system in America.

In 1842, a young priest from France, a member of the fledgling Congregation of Holy Cross, came to the snowy Midwestern part of the United States and opened a university dedicated to Our Lady, a Catholic university meant—as it still is today—to make God known, loved, and served.

In 1993, another priest of the Congregation of Holy Cross did something else unprecedented. At the behest of a Sister of Mercy of the Americas and teamed with a group of friends, this Holy Cross priest decided to send young college graduates into the most under-resourced schools in the South to teach, to strengthen, and to sustain the gift that the nun from Baltimore had started.

When we're sometimes tasked with the unexpected, we make jokes about why we're a part of the ACE team—"it's all for the Alliance" and "what have you done for the Alliance today?"—but in reality, we're all a part of this ACE movement for the same reason. We believe that every child has a right to an outstanding education. We believe it is our responsibility to help provide that education. We believe that Catholic schools are good for America.

Guided by these beliefs, we set out to do something unprecedented—not in company with those unprecedented stories above, but in celebration. We've spent our time preparing to do something unprecedented so we can celebrate Notre Dame, so we can celebrate ACE, and most importantly, so we can celebrate the gift of Catholic schools across America.