Catholic School Advantage

St. Gertrude the Great is a Catholic elementary school rooted in the Salesian tradition and located in the predominantly Latino community of Bell Gardens, California. It is the only Catholic school serving five of the surrounding communities, but after numerous years of declining enrollment, it was slated to close in 2011. That year, Mary Flock was hired as the new principal and inherited a school with no books, 7 teachers, and only 42 students. And if the task of turning the school around were not daunting enough, she was given one year to make it happen.

Mary and her team rolled up their sleeves and got to work, and from day one, her focus was on building a community. Through a lot of hard work, creativity, and sheer will to see St. Gertrude School succeed, Mary and her team were able to increase their enrollment from 42 students to 110 in a single year. Following that year, in the summer of 2012, Mary and her team attended the first Latino Enrollment Institute (LEI) at Notre Dame to further build on the progress they had already made. They also worked closely with ACE’s field consultant in Los Angeles to implement the Madrinas marketing model. Today, St. Gertrude the Great School is thriving with 176 students enrolled, many of whom are from first-generation Latino families, and Mary serves as a mentor principal for the LEI.

St. Clement School, located in the village of St. Bernard in Cincinnati, OH, is a pre-K though 8 Catholic School rooted in the Franciscan tradition. St. Clement School has served the community of St. Bernard for over 160 years, but in more recent years was in danger of closing as enrollment began to decline. That all changed when Principal Jeff Eiser and his wife, Rosie, first came to the school in 2010. For Jeff, a former sheriff's deputy of 29 years, this is a second career. He and his wife, Rosie, saw it as an opportunity to minister together and change young lives through Catholic education. Rosie serves as the volunteer school librarian, but her role extends far beyond that, as she is the main point of contact for the school's Hispanic families. As a wife, mother, and native Spanish-speaker, she is able to identify with the families, speak with them in their native language, and forge strong relationships, which has borne fruit in those families going out and spreading the word about St. Clement.

While St. Clement School continues to be very diverse, it too has followed the same demographic growth trends as much of the nation. The number of Latino families in the parish and the surrounding community have grown at a much faster rate, which gave impetus to St. Clement sending a team to the Latino Enrollment Institute at the University of Notre Dame in the summer 2013. Today, St. Clement School's enrollment is the highest it has been in 20 years.

In June 2012, I had just been hired as Principal of St. Vincent de Paul School in Salem, Oregon and was immediately presented with a number of challenges, the most pressing being the need to increase student enrollment. In addition, there was growing discontent amongst many parishioners that the school was no longer viable and it was costing the parish too much money. The two options at the time were to either close the school or turn it over to be run by a private institution.

But God is wise and good, and together with these challenges He also sent me a tremendous blessing, the opportunity to attend the Latino Enrollment Institute at the University of Notre Dame.

Our pastor, Father Heuberger, had strong feelings that the school must stay open. He listened to the parishioners and was leaning towards turning the school over to a private institution. He organized a team comprised of him, the Pastoral Council Chair, the Hispanic Ministries Chair, the President of the School’s Parent Club, and myself, Principal of the School. His decision to send this team to the LEI changed the future of the school from what appeared to be an imminent gloomy end for St. Vincent de Paul to a renewed sense of hope, ownership, and pride in the school.

Our team that attended the Institute had a vague idea of what to expect, and we were totally taken by what we learned during our three days there. We found an energetic, charismatic, informative and down to earth Fr. Joe Corpora, C.S.C., who welcomed us and set the tone for the Institute. He shared with us relevant statistics and cheered us on to build a culture of success in our school. We heard from several principals who shared with us their challenges and successes, gave us ideas, and helped us to realize that we were not alone with our present challenges. We developed an action plan and left energized with a sense that we had a mandate and we were going to make it happen.

As a new principal, I could not have asked for a better beginning. I had a team behind me who heard the same thing I heard, a team that drafted our plan of action for the school, a team that came back to the parish to share with all why we needed to keep our school open. We met every month to review our progress and share ideas; we were a team on a mission.

In July 2012, we had 30 students registered in the school. We ended the school year with 70 students. When we began the 2013-2014 academic year, we had 96 students enrolled, 64% of them Latino. Our goal was to finish that school year with 100 students and in turn establish a new goal for the following academic year—to increase our enrollment to 125. We believed that with God all things were possible, and today I am happy to report that we did indeed meet that goal. We currently have 125 students enrolled at St. Vincent de Paul, and we intend to continue building on that.

The parishioners are no longer talking about closing our school. They enjoy seeing our students at mass and assisting in the monthly fundraising breakfast. Fr. Heuberger is very proud of what we have accomplished in a year and happily shares the successes while he garners financial support for our ailing building and tuition assistance for our families.

Today our students are happy and excited about learning, and they are proud of their catholic identity. You can feel the same enthusiasm in the families, the teachers, and our parish community. We are so grateful for our experience in the Latino Enrollment Institute, an opportunity which truly brought new life to our school.

When Lynne Mullen, Principal of St. Leander School in the Diocese of Oakland, received the invitation to attend the Latino Enrollment Institute (LEI) in 2012, she saw it as the perfect opportunity to respond to her parish community's changing demographics. Having observed the growing number of Latino families at the Spanish Masses and in the parish religious education programs, she was eager to reach out to this growing population and make Catholic education a more visible and viable option for Latino families in the community.

The LEI provided just the tools she needed to begin this important outreach. After implementing a number of strategies learned at the LEI, including meeting with prospective families after the Spanish Masses, promoting the school from the pulpit, personally walking families through the enrollment process and its accompanying paperwork, and making all scholarship applications and information available in Spanish, Mullen and her staff were able to increase the Latino enrollment at St. Leander by 43 percent the following year.

Mullen returned to Notre Dame the summer after attending the LEI to further develop St. Leander's capacity to serve the growing number of Latino families at the school, particularly those whose primary language is not English. She participated in the English as a New Language Program (ENL), where she learned how to support the academic, linguistic, and cultural needs of the Latino students and families in her school. "I have learned strategic ways to help our parents connect more meaningfully to our school and support their children's education," Mullen said. "The information I learned in my classes has helped our faculty more effectively design curriculum to assess and instruct our language learners. Our partnership with the University of Notre Dame has truly been an integral part of our Latino Enrollment Plan."

Dear Friends of the Catholic School Advantage Campaign,

Summer greetings from ACE and from the University of Notre Dame.

Another "ACE Summer" has come and gone. Either I am getting older or there is more and more activity each summer; the former is certainly true and I think the latter is true as well. There's no doubt that the "ACE Summer" is a way of life.

We had the privilege of hosting two wonderful institutes this summer, starting with the 3rd cohort of the Latino Enrollment Institute (LEI). From June 30 to July 3, we brought together principals, along with members of their faculty and staff, from 32 schools representing 16 arch(dioceses) around the country. The participants spent four days listening to and working with a design team of "mentor principals," learning how to increase Latino enrollment in Catholic schools. The mentor principals are a strong team of six principals who have each "saved" their schools at some point during their career. In every case, the principal either received or was on the verge of receiving the all-too-familiar dreaded phone call from their superintendent informing them that their school was slated to be closed at the end of the school year. In each instance, these principals were able to "save" their school by increasing enrollment. Each mentor principal has been part of the design team since the LEI's inception in the summer of 2012. This year, we had 10 schools from mission dioceses in the United States attend as participants. In addition to the conference at Notre Dame, each school will receive a visit from their mentor principal in the fall, who will work with the principal on issues that have arisen since the beginning of the school year. ACE will also host a follow-up meeting of principals and mentor principals in Scottsdale, Ariz. in February 2015. 

We also hosted the 4th cohort of the School Pastors' Institute. This conference, held July 8 to July 11, brought together 107 Pastors from 51 arch(dioceses) around the country. This conference was preceded by a pre-SPI for pastors new to the role of overseeing a parish school. At the SPI this year, we had a wonderful team of presenters, including Bishop Kevin Vann, the Bishop of Orange, Bishop Frank Caggiano, the Bishop of Bridgeport, Sr. John Mary Fleming, O.P., the Executive Director of the Secretariat for Catholic Education at the USCCB, Sister Mary Paul McCaughey, O.P., Superintendent for Catholic Schools in the Archdiocese of Chicago, and others. Sessions covered a variety of topics, including: "The Pastor and the Catholic Character of the School"; "Pastor and Principal: Partners in Catholic Education"; "Making Catholic Schools Accessible to Economically Poor Children"; and "Ten Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me Before I Became a Pastor with a School." After four summers, more than 300 Pastors from 68 arch(dioceses) have participated in the SPI. We are also pleased to be, for the first time, taking the SPI on the road, as we will host a regional SPI in the fall for pastors with schools in California.

We are so grateful to God for his blessings upon both the LEI and the SPI. Please pray for the schools and people who have participated in our summer institutes, and please keep the work and mission of Catholic education in your prayers as well. You and your intentions are in my admittedly inadequate prayers.

Gratefully yours,
Fr. Joe Corpora, C.S.C.