Catholic School Advantage

The Alliance for Catholic Education’s English as a New Language Program (ENL) recently published a new handbook as part of the NCEA’s (National Catholic Educational Association) Exceptional Learners Series. “Our Legacy and Our Future: A Framework for Serving English Learners in Catholic Schools” addresses the urgent moral imperative faced by Catholic schools today to provide teachers with the necessary tools and expertise to effectively serve English language learners (ELLs).

The need for teachers formed in ENL best practices in Catholic schools is indeed urgent. While the number of ELLs is sharply rising, the number of teachers and leaders formed and prepared to teach and care for them lags. Researchers in language acquisition, deJong and Harper (2013), report that less than twenty-five percent of teachers have ENL formation, and underscore that forming teachers prepared to address the unique challenges of language learners is key to their academic success.

This handbook and school implementation guide is designed to at least start the conversation about how Catholic schools can welcome and serve a more culturally and linguistically diverse student population while also recognizing the unique opportunity that ELLs and their families have to enrich our Catholic schools. These NCEA Briefs are short enough that they can be read in one sitting and is small enough to keep within reach for reference to ideas easily put into practice in the classroom. Order your copy at the NCEA online store.

Fr. Joe Corpora, C.S.C., Director of University-School Partnerships and of the Catholic School Advantage Campaign, recently wrote a book, The Relentless Mercy of God. Father Joe writes about his experience serving the Church as a Missionary of Mercy. 

From the editor and publisher: 

“This is a book that can change one’s life.  It is a book about God’s mercy—the kind of mercy that reaches out to each of us, no matter where we are on our path of life.

We are all sinners, but the relentless mercy of God reaches out to us and offers us not rejection, but embrace, not abandonment, but welcome—or welcome back.

On these pages, Father Corpora, a commissioned Missionary of Mercy, shares the reality of God’s relentless mercy. His insights awaken us to the love God has for each of us and the mercy that brings His love into our daily lives.  Father Corpora is a wonderful guide—take the journey with him.”

The book is available from Amazon.com, the Hammes Notre Dame Bookstore, or directly from the author/publisher. 

To purchase a signed copy of the book, please send a check for $18.94 (cost of book and shipping and handling) made payable to Corby Books to:

Fr. Joe Corpora, C.S.C.
124 Corby Hall
Notre Dame, IN 46556

John Staud, Executive Director for the Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) at the University of Notre Dame, likes to tell a story about the moment he knew that a great number of Latinos could be found anywhere in the Unites States, and that they would be the future of the Catholic Church. About a decade ago, he was at a rest stop in Lima, Ohio. Lima is a small, old German farming town in the middle of rural Ohio. At this rest stop, to John’s astonishment, were signs in both English and Spanish. It was his “aha” moment, and ACE would never be the same.

Fast forward to the present, and the Latino Enrollment Institute (LEI) is now in its sixth year. Having served almost 200 schools from 41 states, the LEI has proven there is a need to focus on Latino enrollment in Catholic schools not only in states like California, Texas, and Florida, but throughout the entire nation.

This is our second installment of the English as a New Language Program’s Moments with Multicultural Saints, intended to provide useful classroom takeaways that will help you to broaden perspectives, teach about the universal Church, and find inspiration from saints from around the world. This month, we highlight the life of Mother Laura Montoya. You will find two different versions below, tailored to the appropriate age range of your students.

The Latino Enrollment Institute (LEI), as implied by the very name of the program, began as an enrollment-based initiative. As Catholic schools around the country were seeing their numbers diminish – and in many unfortunate cases even close – reaching out to the Latino population was a perfect way to sustain enrollment in Catholic schools while serving a segment of the population that had been largely underserved in traditional public schools.

For the most part, the reality of the Catholic schools that have attended the LEI over the years has been one of enrollment crisis. Many Catholic schools affected by the economic downturn and changing demographics were struggling to remain viable, and the LEI has been an opportunity to alter their course – or at least their way of doing certain things –  and to reach out to an untapped population springing up around them.

But while many of the schools that have attended the LEI over the years have done so out of necessity, Andra Zommers, principal of St. Augustine Cathedral School in Kalamazoo, Michigan, came to the LEI from a different reality. In her reflection below, Andra provides a beautiful testimonial that illustrates how the Latino Enrollment Institute is about more than just increasing school enrollments.