News

Jack Wallace, a high school teacher at Holy Cross of San Antonio with the University of Notre Dame's ACE Teaching Fellows (ACE) program, has experienced, energized, and taught the power of a caring community by his reaction to the recent shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT.

As a result of conversations with fellow teachers in Texas and a much broader outreach to other Catholic school teachers through Facebook, the people of Newtown will soon receive hundreds of letters of compassionate support from children in Catholic school classrooms around the country.

Jack, a member of the ACE 19 cohort, hails from Fairfield, Conn., a short distance from the site where 27 children and adults were gunned down on Dec. 14. The shock hit Jack close to home for several reasons, partly because he has friends from Newtown who attended Catholic high school with him.

After learning of the tragic deaths, he approached his fellow teachers living together in the San Antonio community with the idea of having his students write letters to Newtown expressing their grief and sympathy. The other teachers affirmed the lesson in sharing one's love and building the Body of Christ. They not only supported the idea, but said they would do the same in their own classrooms. One colleague suggested using social media to spread the idea nationwide.

 "I told them, if you want to make it more real for your kids, you can tell them these letters are literally going to be handed to somebody your teacher knows, and he'll hand-deliver them to Newtown," Jack explained later. He has learned online that teachers from Washington, D.C., to Oakland, Calif., invited their students to put their thoughts on paper and sent those messages to the home of Jack's family, where he planned to arrive on Saturday, Dec. 22, for Christmas break.

"The support has been unbelievable," he says.

His plan, as of the one-week anniversary of the tragedy, was to wait until a couple of days after Christmas and then take the letters—along with some financial contributions made in San Antonio—to Saint Rose of Lima Parish in Newtown.

"It would be absolutely incredible to walk up to Monsignor [Robert] Weiss, the pastor, and say, here are a thousand letters from Catholic schools all over that really support you and the town," comments Jack. "Anything that can uplift a town like that is really worth doing."

Content awaited.

In late 2012, a team of educators from the Mary Ann Remick Leadership Program (RLP) traveled to Ireland to share experiences and ideas about Catholic school leadership.

The group, headed by Rev. Ronald Nuzzi, senior director of ACE's RLP, met with professors at the Mary Immaculate College of Education in Limerick, visited local classrooms, and continued a cross-Atlantic dialogue in the spirit of support for schools with a Catholic identity.

The visitors also included three faculty members of RLP—Jim Frabutt, Anthony Holter, and Tami Schmitz—and two alumni of the program, who are now serving Catholic schools as principals in Indianapolis, Indiana, and Columbus, Ohio. They are, respectively, Mary McCoy, principal of St. Philip Neri Catholic School, and Joel Wichtman, principal of Saint Andrew Elementary School.

Mary Immaculate College is one of the largest teacher training institutions in Ireland. The dialogue with that college is expected to continue this spring when representatives from Mary Immaculate visit Notre Dame, where ACE is the largest provider of teachers and services to Catholic schools in the U.S. ACE leaders and faculty have been responding to Irish educators' invitations for mutual learning and collaboration since 1996.

Photo: (seated) Tami Schmitz, Joel Wichtman; (standing l to r) Rev. Ronald Nuzzi, Mary McCoy, Jim Frabutt, Anthony Holter.

"I have so much to learn both inside and outside the classroom," said this ACE Teaching Fellows (STT) applicant. "A program that enables me to...be a student and do service through my job as a teacher is the best decision I can make [toward that end]."

So said Blair Carlin, now a second year teacher in the STT program. At its annual retreat this month, she shared her thoughts about the experience, especially as it's led her to discover what she truly treasures.

As a senior at Notre Dame, she begins, "I applied to the ACE Program and I applied for a Fulbright Teaching Assistantship in Spain...During the first week of the ACE summer, I questioned why I declined my Fulbright acceptance and why I even applied to ACE...

"Despite the fact that I was part of a program based on community where everyone is so chipper, positive, and welcoming, I had never felt more different, alone, and out of place. Moreover, I felt as though my students did not get what I was teaching and their parents did not get that I was actually trying to help their children and not destroy them.

"However, through this darkness, when I felt like I was being a greater disservice than service to my students, their parents, my community, and ACE, I came to understand my greatest treasure: people. It was as though my relationships had to be compromised for me to see that they were my greatest sources of light."

Through her classroom experience, Blair has also come to understand teaching as a powerful way to serve that treasure. "Teaching is one of the most real and special forms of philanthropy. Teachers get to help individuals become excited about learning and help them form themselves and their beliefs. Teachers get to help their students find their treasures, which is a great treasure in and of itself."

The Fulcrum Foundation, which provides financial support for Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of Seattle, reported in its recent newsletter about a symposium on intercultural competency in Catholic education.

Among the speakers at the Oct. 25 symposium was Rev. Joseph Corpora, C.S.C., addressing the gathering in his capacity as director of the Catholic School Advantage campaign and director of university-school partnerships for the Alliance for Catholic Education.

"In his presentation, Fr. Corpora explained the need for our schools to respond to the changing demographics of Catholic families and students," said the Fulcrum newsletter's winter edition. "He stressed the importance of embracing the great influx of Latino families in our parishes because they provide a future of hope for our schools and our Church."

Fr. Corpora and other speakers discussed issues such as the call "welcome all ethnically and culturally diverse families" and the need for "practical strategies" that welcome Latino families and empower Latino students.

The Fulcrum Foundation is active in key endeavors for extending the Catholic school advantage to diverse communities—namely, increasing disadvantaged families' access to high-quality educational alternatives. As noted at its website, the foundation provides tuition assistance to families, assistance to schools in need, and support for initiatives that promote academic excellence and faith formation.