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Rev. Ronald Nuzzi, Ph.D., a faculty fellow of the Institute for Educational Initiatives at the University of Notre Dame in the United States, returned recently to the University of Notre Dame Australia’s Fremantle Campus to teach the course “Leadership as Reflective Practice.” The course, which he teaches as a visiting professor every other year, is a required unit for aspiring Catholic school leaders. Fr. Nuzzi, founding director of the Mary Ann Remick Leadership Program in the Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE), is a faculty member of ACE on the Notre Dame campus in Indiana.

Fr. Nuzzi, well known as an author and editor of books and articles on Catholic schools, recently collaborated with several international scholars and authored a chapter in the newly published book, Global Perspectives on Catholic Education in Schools (Springer, 2015). He wrote on U.S. Catholic K-12 schools.

(This year, students in the Freemantle course--pictured here with Fr. Nuzzi--met at the Catholic Education Offices of the Archdiocese of Perth in Leederville, Western Australia.)

Saint Cecilia Catholic School in Camden, NJ, is permeated by what the students and faculty like to call a “Beatitude Attitude.” No one encapsulates that phrase better than Charlotte Brown Perez, the school’s resource teacher and a member of the 10th cohort in ACE’s English as a New Language (ENL) certification program.

Even though the local community is afflicted by poverty and violence, Perez’s school is part of its own small community that works against those negative influences.

“When the parishes were no longer able to support the schools financially,” Perez explained, “the diocesan school leaders decided to pool their resources.”

Today, the five Catholic Partnership Schools of Camden maintain their unique identities and traditions, but work hand in hand to advance the mission of Catholic education.

Even before teaching English, Perez was responsible for supporting the learning of all students as her school’s resource teacher. Many Catholic schools lack the means to support various forms of differentiated instruction, so her presence is a blessing to all.

“My lesson plan book looks like an intricately woven tapestry of grades and subjects,” Perez said. “I might be teaching seventh grade math and fourth grade reading during the same period, or eighth grade writing and fifth grade social studies the same block.”

There is no doubt that Perez’s work helps alleviate any stigma against students with special needs. Children at Saint Cecilia have come to embrace the notion that everyone learns a little differently. Perez particularly loves how she is able to empower and encourage parents.

“I get to see parents who were told their child ‘can’t’ and tell them ‘they can, and they did!” Perez said. “How amazing is that?”

Saint Cecilia, like many Catholic schools in urban areas, is full of minority and immigrant students who need extra instruction in English in order to thrive academically and socially. Perez’s particular role at Saint Cecilia did not, until recently, involve teaching English to non-native speakers. A few years ago, a colleague asked for her help during a summer ENL program, and she fell in love.  It was a smooth transition from helping her special education students to helping non-native English speakers, as the underlying principles—justice and equal dignity—are the same.

As much as Perez loves her students, though, her background as an educator was not always sufficient to help them learn English.

“My lack of formal training was preventing me from being as effective as possible,” she said.

The ENL program at the University of Notre Dame was just what Perez needed. She wanted a program that would allow her to teach—and learn—with a holistic view of her students’ lives in mind. Many of them have experienced very difficult situations, and the non-native speakers are no exception. ACE’s ENL program was a Catholic institution, she knew, designed particularly to form and educate leaders in Catholic schools.

“I am so thankful that I can talk about religion when comforting students who have experienced trauma,” Perez said. “I'm not sure I'd be able teach without talking about faith.”

Today, Perez is better equipped with skills and strategies to be an effective ENL and special education teacher, but she has always been a powerful presence in her students’ lives because of her advocacy and love.

“I pray every day that those students feel validated, that they know how special they are to know two languages, and that they know how important their cultural traditions are,” she said. “My goal in Catholic education is for all students to thrive academically, socially, and spiritually.”

Stephanie Margetts, executive director of Holy Rosary Regional School/Juan Diego Academy (HRRS/JDA) in Tacoma, Wash., says she has seen the future—and heard it, too. She is leading an educational innovation called two-way immersion, or dual-language instruction that is transforming this Catholic school with a previously shrinking enrollment.

“Now, you walk in and you feel the energy of a bicultural school that celebrates the English and Spanish languages equally,” Margetts said. Enrollment, spanning pre-K for three-year-olds through eighth grade, increased 28 percent last year to 191 currently.

The student body is roughly half English-dominant, half Spanish-dominant. Pre-schoolers, regardless of their dominant tongue, spend their whole day speaking 100% Spanish; kindergarteners follow a 90% Spanish and 10% English model; and as of 2015, grades 1-3 maintain a 50-50 schedule, rotating one day totally in Spanish with the next immersed in English. Over several years, the approach will climb age levels, up through grade 8.

“We’ve created a model that people want,” Margetts said. Reaching out to a working class region of the state where diverse families share high aspirations for their children, “the model allows us to serve, to bring cultures together. That’s an exciting part of what we’ve been doing.”

A combination of incremental changes has kept every day exciting for students. In 2010, Holy Rosary’s enrollment had declined to 101; the Fulcrum Foundation, providing financial support to students in the Seattle Archdiocese, consulted with the foundation’s diversity committee to establish the first ever two-way immersion program in the archdiocese. The school continues to seek teachers with subject-area knowledge who are bilingual.

Experienced mentors have come together to help make the investment in HRRS/JDA bear fruit. A bilingual, bicultural teacher already on their staff became the leader of this mission—building a Catholic school whose curriculum is fully aligned with the changing demographics of the Catholic Church.  An estimated 35-40% of Catholics in the U.S. today are Latino.

In 2011, HRRA/JDA joined the Two-Way Immersion Network for Catholic Schools (TWIN-CS) initiative at Boston College’s Lynch School of Education. Dr. Tim Uhl, now superintendent of schools for the Diocese of Helena, led Holy Rosary’s transition as its principal. Dr. Bridget Yaden has worked closely with the school as a board member and as chair of a local university’s Hispanic studies department.

Margetts arrived at HRRS/JDA for 2014-2015 from Sacred Heart School in Washington, D.C. Sacred Heart adopted dual-language instruction 16 years ago. Along with Escuela Guadalupe in Denver, Sacred Heart was one of the first Catholic schools in the United States to implement two-way immersion. For the past three years, TWIN-CS has supported other schools adopting this model (close to 20 in total).

Elise Heil, who leads Sacred Heart as its principal today, said the school’s enrollment has held steady around 200 students, with the two-way immersion model consistently appealing to many parents from various backgrounds, some of whom can utilize the District’s school voucher program.

This model helps schools garner interest from parents because they see it boosting academic rigor and student readiness for a diverse culture. English language-dominant families see fluency in Spanish preparing their children for a multilingual society, Heil said, adding that numerous Spanish language-dominant parents appreciate the life-skills development as well as the school’s Catholic identity. Schools have become more intentional in how to engage all families in embracing diversity.

Heill noted that immersion fosters solidarity because “everybody is a language learner.” But this two-way approach is not easily replicable among all schools, she said.

“This is still a very new model,” although the diverse, competitive D.C. education marketplace has prompted more ventures into multiple-language immersion. The model is familiar in many public schools around the country, but it is generating insights as more schools implement it.

“The younger you start, the better,” Heil said, recommending that a school initiate the approach among three- and four-year-old preschoolers, then add grades incrementally over a period of years.

Sacred Heart is sharing its expertise with some of the newcomers. Heil said every school experiences challenges, including her own. Non-bilingual applicants cannot be accepted beyond second grade. No Catholic high schools in the area replicate the approach, so no long-term K-through-12 continuity exists. The model’s major sectors of growing student enrollment are in the pre-K classes.

Luis Ricardo Fraga, Ph.D., who helped start HRRS/JDA in Tacoma as a board member with the Fulcrum Foundation, continues to study the approach closely among his research topics as the Arthur Foundation Endowed Professor of Transformative Latino Leadership at the University of Notre Dame. As a political scientist and fellow of the Institute for Educational Initiatives, he has written about Holy Rosary’s transition.

“Two-way immersion in Catholic schools can be an effective mechanism for building intercultural communities that capture the richness of diverse communities,” he said. “As the Catholic Church in the United States becomes more and more multicultural, two-way immersion values both English and Spanish languages and cultures in ways fully consistent with recent statements of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.”

Fraga and other scholars have noted that the approach is well-suited to Catholic values—a respect for the dignity of distinct cultures, the notion of a “common good” to be pursued by all, and a special care for those on society’s margins.

Although the resources available for language education models will differ among schools, the stewardship of those resources takes place in a strong family context, as Heil pointed out.

“We’re kind of a home for many immigrant families, and the Catholic piece is something that brings us all together,” she said of Sacred Heart School. “We have a shared mission and a shared goal. Becoming a bilingual school really benefits the entire population.”

John Schoenig, ACE's Director of Teacher Formation and Education Policy, was featured on WSJ.com's Opinion Journal segment to discuss the nation's report card on education. 

When Mayra Wilson, graduate of ACE's ENL program, accepted a part-time position with the Archdiocese of Cincinnati to help improve Latino outreach and enrollment for the Archdiocese’s more than 100 Catholic schools, she knew she had her work cut out for her. The Archdiocese’s outreach up to that point had been minimal, and she would be starting nearly from scratch. But she kept one thing on her mind as she began her efforts.

“Our families want a Catholic school, our families want to be close to their faith, and they want the best for their kids.”

Wilson started with families and with individual schools in an attempt to bring together parents who wanted a Catholic education for the children but didn’t know how to access it with schools who wanted to reach out to the local community but didn’t know how to get started.

“There was clearly a need for [outreach],” she said. “Many schools in the urban settings were wanting to reach out to this community, but they didn’t know how to. In particular, the biggest challenge they saw was the language barrier.”

Born and raised in Peru, Wilson felt a connection to the Latino communities of Cincinnati and felt as though she was positioned well to be a liaison between Latino families and schools. Though she had become known in the Latino communities through her work throughout college, she felt like she needed to reposition herself in this new role.

“I would go to different masses in Spanish, I would go to different events in the community—I was trying to be really present,” she said. “Now, [I’m] the Catholic school lady, everyone knows me as that. I wasn’t afraid of going out and meeting with families after Mass, I wasn’t afraid of eating the tamales and sharing food, and just building that trust for families.”

In Wilson’s four years working with the Archdiocese, Latino enrollment is up more than 50 percent, and this year, they’ve hired another Latino Outreach Coordinator who will focus on the northern portion of the Archdiocese. Wilson spoke this summer at Notre Dame’s Alliance for Catholic Education as part of Vámanos, a workshop for recruiters of Latinos to Catholic schools hosted by the Catholic School Advantage Campaign.

Wilson said that parents and schools alike are excited and ready to start making the effort, they just need guidance on how to start.

“We wanted to make sure our parents understood all the nuances of the school, but also wanted to make sure the school staff and the principals understood where our families were,” Wilson said. “We wanted to make sure they understood how our families communicated, how our programs needed to be friendly, how some stuff needed to be bilingual. We needed to appreciate the culture, appreciate the language, and rather than see it as a barrier, see it as an opportunity and explore how to make the best of these opportunities.”