ACE's Catholic School Advantage campaign: Updates on Outreach
A series of reports on change and hope for Latino students
Next week, the Catholic Church will celebrate the Feast Day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, who is honored as Patroness of the Americas.
The Dec. 12 feast is a good opportunity for Notre Dame’s Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) to share our aspirations and activities in our work to welcome more Latino children into Catholic K-12 schools. ACE's Catholic School Advantage campaign includes collaborations with many partners across the United States, and we already have seen some stories that reflect the goals and hopes of this initiative.
The starting point for the endeavor was a report by the Notre Dame Task Force on the Participation of Latino Children and Families in Catholic Schools, issued on the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe in 2009. That report, To Nurture the Soul of a Nation: Latino Families, Catholic Schools, and Educational Opportunity, warned of an academic achievement gap besetting the Latino population and the need to bring more Latino students into Catholic schools where they could gain access to an excellent education.
We will use this week, starting today, to help an array of stakeholders and friends of Catholic education--the extended community of ACE and the Institute for Educational Initiatives—to get to know the Catholic School Advantage campaign better. Over the next several days, the ACE website will present a series of stories that represent snapshots of the campaign's perspectives and people.
Two years after the Notre Dame Task Force Report, the Catholic School Advantage campaign is gaining momentum as a nationwide initiative. The goal is to increase the national enrollment of Latino children in Catholic schools from about 300,000 to 1 million students by 2020. This goal highlights ACE’s broader mission to sustain, strengthen, and transform Catholic schools—to make the gift of a Catholic education more accessible for all children, with particular attention to marginalized communities and under-resourced schools.
As part of this series of stories on the campaign, you’ll read “letters from the field” written by ACE field consultants working every day, on-site, with arch/dioceses whose leaders and schools are ACE’s partners in this effort. (These representatives who connect local educators to the resources of ACE and Notre Dame are part of the ACE Consulting team, bringing management skills and strategic insights to Catholic schools around the country.) Some of the Catholic School Advantage schools are already enjoying their own successes in line with the cultural changes and other approaches advanced by Catholic School Advantage, even though the campaign was launched only last year.
In this week’s series of updates, you’ll also read about a school that has increased its Latino enrollment sharply while intensifying its own Catholic identity and living out its long-standing values.
You’ll get to know Father Joseph Corpora, C.S.C., who directs the Catholic School Advantage campaign and shares his experience and insights with Church and education leaders in lectures and conferences throughout the United States.
You can hear Father Joe and two of ACE’s field consultants, Juana Sanchez and Paul Rodriguez, in a live, Spanish-language broadcast/webcast on Radio Maria, at 9 pm-10 pm Eastern Time on Tuesday, Dec. 6. Go to http://radiomaria.us/texas/ and click “Listen Live.”
See a video on the Catholic School Advantage campaign.
More information is available always at the ACE website and the section on ACE's Catholic School Advantage campaign. Learn even more about ACE and about Notre Dame’s commitment to advancing K-12 education at http://iei.nd.edu, and http://forum.nd.edu.
As part of this series of stories on the campaign, you’ll read “letters from the field” written by ACE field consultants working every day, on-site, with arch/dioceses whose leaders and schools are ACE’s partners in this effort. (These representatives who connect local educators to the resources of ACE and Notre Dame are part of the ACE Consulting team, bringing management skills and strategic insights to Catholic schools around the country.) Some of the Catholic School Advantage schools are already enjoying their own successes in line with the cultural changes and other approaches advanced by Catholic School Advantage, even though the campaign was launched only last year.
In this week’s series of updates, you’ll also read about a school that has increased its Latino enrollment sharply while intensifying its own Catholic identity and living out its long-standing values.
You’ll get to know Father Joseph Corpora, C.S.C., who directs the Catholic School Advantage campaign and shares his experience and insights with Church and education leaders in lectures and conferences throughout the United States.
You can hear Father Joe and two of ACE’s field consultants, Juana Sanchez and Paul Rodriguez, in a live, Spanish-language broadcast/webcast on Radio Maria, at 9 pm-10 pm Eastern Time on Tuesday, Dec. 6. Go to http://radiomaria.us/texas/ and click “Listen Live.”
See a video on the Catholic School Advantage campaign.
More information is available always at the ACE website and the section on ACE's Catholic School Advantage campaign. Learn even more about ACE and about Notre Dame’s commitment to advancing K-12 education at http://iei.nd.edu, and http://forum.nd.edu.