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How do summer day camp experiences—like the programs offered annually in local Catholic schools, with help from the Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE)—affect a typical Notre Dame faculty or staff member's family?

For one thing, you may find three teenage boys sitting around your dinner table trading tips about building bridges, says Tracy Faulkner, administrative assistant in Visitation Hall.

The Faulkner children—Jake and Ben (junior and freshman, respectively, at Saint Joseph High School) and William (in seventh grade at Saint Joseph Grade School)—have been known to have that discussion more than once. In recent years, each of them has attended a science camp that is one of the options for middle-school students registered for summer camps hosted by the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend in partnership with ACE.

"They compared notes," Tracy says of her sons. "When one of them was about to start the camp, they still talked about the bridges they had teamed up to build years before. An older one would say, oh, don't make that mistake" with a truss or beam or anything crucial in the contest between bridges' weight-bearing capacities.

All three of them remembered their experiences, whether a given camp season focused on the science and math of bridge design or rocket-building or ecosystem stewardship, Tracy recalls this year's middle-school focus areas, besides science, include "Managing Your Fantasy Team," "The Heroine," and "Monsters in the Movies."

She remembers how engaged the boys became in their camps: "When you can get a child to get up early in the morning in the summer, you know they want to be there."

The boys' teachers immersed in the study of their craft with ACE clearly want to be there, too.

"They're the most amazing group," Tracy says. "They get their energy off the kids' excitement." These Notre Dame graduate students, led by mentors and veteran faculty at schools including Christ the King, St. Adalbert's, St. Vincent's in Elkhart, and Saint Joseph High School, pursue a Master of Education degree and bond with the camp students in exploring subjects they love—like math, language arts, and science.

"It's almost as if [the ACE Teachers in science camp] were older lab partners, as if each student had a lab partner who was older and could reach the top shelf and get the cool stuff," Tracy recalls from her sons' reports.

Because of a team approach in projects, a very favorable teacher-to-student ratio, and a camp environment with minimal pressure (alongside rigors of discipline and safety), "the teachers found a way to make every child fit in," she says.

William remembers the fun of group puzzles and contests in another one of the summer camps he attended, back in third grade, Tracy says. He learned more about everyday math, and the morning-only, three-week sessions allowed all three Faulkner boys to enjoy other kinds of summer fun.

A low-priced, low-pressure injection of learning into students' summers "keeps them ready for the classroom in the fall," she says. While not an all-day, season-long immersion, every morning session adds "something positive" to the summer. "It gets them up and moving, and it's a good way to start their day."

Options for the days of summer 2015 are more numerous, reflecting growth in this Catholic School Educational Program, hosted by the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend for more than a decade. The number of students served through the many alternatives has grown from about 100 to more than 250.

ACE summer camp assistant director Patrick Kirkland says the goal is to welcome a larger number of students this year, from all backgrounds and all of Michiana.

A high school summer school format has been added for grades 9-12, and a range of focus subject areas is offered for middle school. Registration is now open. Children from faculty and staff families of the Notre Dame community are among those invited to register at http://ace.nd.edu/summercamp/.

As for the Faulkners, Tracy already knows William will be among the camps' repeat-registrants. "He'll go to one of them this summer," she says. "We're really looking forward to it."

Sitting on a dusty street corner just off of Interstate 10 in Tucson, Ariz., is Santa Cruz Catholic School, where students have taken to heart Jesus’ command to love thy neighbor—neighbors who, for them, are often homeless.

According to the 2013 Homelessness in Arizona Annual Report, “the density of Pima County’s homeless population remains the highest in the state and higher than the national average,” with one of every 131 people having experienced homelessness. Many of these people live in South Tucson.

Fifth grade and ACE Teacher Rose Raderstorf said she spends the first few weeks of the school year at Santa Cruz discussing Catholic Social Teaching with her ten- and eleven-year-old students.

“My kids had never heard of it, but they quickly latched on to the ideas of respecting human dignity, preferential option for the poor, and solidarity,” Raderstorf said.

The class worked to make these teachings relevant to their own lives. Raderstorf patiently listened as the children worked to find ways that they could truly show love for the poor, even as young people, even with limited resources. One student suggested making sandwiches for the people living in Santa Rita Park a few blocks down the street.

 “He said, ‘we should make sandwiches for the people living in the homeless park. Then we should take it to them and eat with them so they have someone to talk to,’” Raderstorf said.

Santa Cruz is one of the Notre Dame ACE Academies in Tucson, a network of partner-schools with the University of Notre Dame’s Alliance for Catholic Education that aim to provide a Catholic education of the highest quality to as many children as possible in under-served communities. Many Santa Cruz students benefit from the school’s free and reduced lunch program, yet they worked together and made sacrifices to supply the materials needed to make the sandwiches.

"The first time we made sandwiches as a class, a few parents, students and I took them to the homeless park across the street after school,” Raderstorf said. “We had so many left over that a parent suggested we take the extras to Casa Maria.”

Casa Maria is a Catholic Worker Community which runs a soup kitchen and distributes over 500 lunches and 100 bags of groceries each day. In addition to providing nourishment, the Casa Maria community offers other services and ministries to the homeless community in South Tucson.

“While we were there, the director of Casa Maria told our class that they had run out of food that day and were not going to be able to give lunches to the 500-600 people that would be there the next afternoon. He told the kids that they were a God-send, and truly helping make miracles happen.”

Inspired by their own ability to do good in the world, Raderstorf’s fifth grade students now take sandwiches to Casa Maria each month. More than just feeding their neighbors, the fifth grade students are experiencing fellowship with those people so often overlooked or ignored by others.

“The last time we made sandwiches, we went to Mass with the Casa Maria community,” Raderstorf said. “We sat on over-turned milk crates, right next to the people who would later be eating our sandwiches for lunch.”

After Mass, one student wrote, “the best part of today was going to Mass with the people who were going to eat our sandwiches. They just smiled so big when they saw all the sandwiches. It was so cool that we did this, it gave me that butterfly feeling in my stomach.”

In many schools, service becomes something out-of-the-ordinary: a field trip, a focused event during Catholic Schools Week, or a graduation requirement. For Raderstorf's fifth grade class, service is becoming a routine and a source of joy. They now hope to share that experience with others and are bringing more classes from Santa Cruz along to share the Eucharist and share their service with the homeless population of South Tucson.

In addition to material resources and academic programs, Notre Dame encourages each Notre Dame ACE Academy to develop a strong set of root beliefs and core values at the heart of each school's mission, which, for Santa Cruz, includes: "We are called to love because God loves us;" "We are called to be a family—sean una familia;" and "We are called to live the gospel." One signs that adorns the hallways and classrooms of Santa Cruz and the other Notre Dame ACE Academies reads: “Love God. Love others. That’s it!”

Raderstorf’s class shows that even those who have little to give can be incredible forces of good in the community and can show love and companionship to those so often abandoned or criticized. Their work is not complicated by motives or incentives. Instead, they are simply loving God by loving others.

“The church has it right,” Raderstorf said. “We all need a little child-like faith.”

For most members of the newest cohort of ACE Teachers, this past Wednesday marked an end to a week’s worth of waiting between receiving their acceptance letter and learning their school placement.  Would they be going to Baton Rouge or Chicago? Should they brace themselves for a move to the South or a new life on the West Coast? Some are still discerning whether or not to accept their placement in ACE 22.

For a handful the newest ACE Teachers, however, Wednesday night marked an end of a much longer waiting period: fifty-two weeks to be exact. These Notre Dame students said “yes” to ACE with no prior knowledge of where that commitment might send them, in response to an invitation to participate in the ACE Internship program.

For the last several years, ACE has invited rising seniors from Notre Dame, Saint Mary’s, and Holy Cross who were interested in serving the ACE mission during their final year of college and who were willing to commit to two years of teaching with ACE upon graduation. Current intern Katie Moran calls it “going all in;” as soon as she knew learned about the ACE Teaching Fellows, she wanted to throw herself into working with ACE as much as possible.

Moran said her certainty came from a few different sources: the testimony of ACE interns she met in her first few years at Notre Dame, her own gifts, and ACE’s compelling Catholic character. She was also drawn, as were her fellow interns, to the intensive training and preparation ACE offers its teachers. 

“I know I’ll be a good teacher—eventually,” she said. “And ACE is what’s going to help me do that.”

Her fellow intern, Anthony Barrett, echoed Moran’s thoughts. He said he’s awed by the fact that every year, ACE takes “ninety people with almost no teaching experience” and turns them into capable and joy-filled teachers across the country. He said it’s one of the things that made him want to choose ACE in the first place.

The six interns selected last April have said “yes” to ACE again and again over the last eleven months as they have assisted ACE team members in mission-critical roles to recruit their future community members, reach out to potential applicants from other colleges, and network with other on-campus students looking to learn more about the ACE experience.  

This semester, several have had opportunities to work on projects with ACE faculty. Moran speaks with enthusiasm about her work helping Dr. Matt Kloser with his research in STEM education, while fellow interns Barrett and Johnny Fuller said they are similarly excited by their projects to examine iPad use in the classroom and analyze data on the impact of the thriving Notre Dame ACE Academies.

As the year draws to a close, the interns said they look forward to embracing the next step in their involvement with the ACE movement as they are sent off to serve both the church and their students through the ministry of Catholic schools. More than where they are going, however, the interns are excited about meeting the people who will walk the journey alongside them and welcoming the rest of ACE 22 into an adventure they have been anticipating since last spring.

The deadline for applications for the 2015-2016 ACE Internship is on March 27^th.  To learn more about the internship and find out how to apply, click here. 

For Irish immigrants coming the United States in the 19th Century, St. Patrick's Day meant a great deal—it was a day to celebrate their heritage, a heritage that was treated with contempt in many circles of American society. 

In a column from the Wall Street Journal, Bill McGurn explains why St. Patrick's Day can serve as an important reminder of the Irish people's "singular achievement in their adoptive homeland"—Catholic schools:

Just as they did in the days of the great Irish migrations, Catholic schools in our own time hold out perhaps the best hope for the assimilation and upward advancement of a new wave of immigrants: Latinos.

"What the Irish were to our country in the 19th century, Latinos are for our nation in the 21st century," says the Rev. Timothy Scully, CSC, cofounder of Notre Dame’s Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE).

'Former Mayor Ed Koch once famously remarked that ‘When masses of immigrants reached our shores in the 19th century, they were greeted by two women: Lady Liberty and Mother Church,’ ” says Father Scully. “What Mayor Koch was referring to, of course, were the parish schools. What the Catholic schools did for the Irish then, Catholic schools must and will do for Latinos today.”

* * *

The reality, however, is that Latinos have a larger problem . . . Begin with this: Only 16% of the Latino high-school students in America are college ready, according to Notre Dame’s Task Force on the Participation of Latino Children and Families in Catholic Schools. Barely half graduate from high school in four years.

So what kind of dream is it to design programs geared to college when most Latino kids are written off before they can even start?

* * *

Unlike the Irish, Latinos don’t come here with the advantage of English. Unlike the immigrant Irish of yesteryear, they haven’t embraced the Catholic schools: Overall Latinos count for only 3% of the Catholic-school enrollment in the U.S.

But if the challenges are daunting the benefits are clear: Latinos who attend Catholic schools are 42% more likely to graduate from high school. They are 2½ times more likely to graduate from college. And the Catholic nature of the schools means there is some natural overlap with the Latin American cultures from whence these new arrivals have come.

Put it this way: Is it really all that hard to believe that a Latino schoolgirl might be more comfortable mastering English and embracing American culture if she is learning in a school where she sees, say, a print of Our Lady of Guadalupe—patroness of all the Americas—hanging on the wall?

“On St. Patrick’s Day we celebrate the mutual blessings that America was for the Irish and the Irish were for America,” says Father Scully.

“We believe one day the same will be said of Latinos now arriving on our shores. At least if the Catholic schools have anything to do with it.”

Read the full story Feliz Día de San Patricio at the Wall Street Journal.

“I will not abandon the city of Washington in its time of need.”

With these words, then-Archbishop of Washington, DC, Cardinal James Hickey, announced in 1997 an investment of several hundred thousand dollars to keep struggling urban Catholic schools alive.

The city and its schools have changed a lot since then but Cardinal Hickey’s commitment remains intact in a distinctive educational structure born in that era—the Consortium of Catholic Academies.

While the Consortium may be relatively small—four inner-city elementary schools within the Archdiocese of Washington, DC—its executive director says its big commitment and big ideas deserve to spread, locally and beyond the Beltway.

Marguerite Conley, executive director of the Consortium since 2010, says its “highly effective governance model” has generated advantages for principals and teachers, students and parents, and pastors and communities, although there’s more to be done.

The Consortium’s governance model separates and consolidates nearly all the business responsibilities for the four schools to Conley’s office, she says, which allows principals to focus on the day-to-day academic, spiritual, and community life of their individual schools. It also entrusts a volunteer board of directors with general oversight of the operations and, very importantly, fundraising to help make Catholic education more accessible to more students in Washington’s disadvantaged neighborhoods. Conley interacts with the principals almost daily, and she and her staff work closely with the archdiocesan schools office, which supervises a much larger number of schools.

“I think this governance model is one to consider when looking at the future of our schools, not just inner-city schools,” says Conley, a former principal. Centralized business practices—purchasing books and selecting equipment vendors, for example—create more leverage in making some purchases. The pastors of the parishes involved have felt freed to focus on the schools’ Catholic identity and evangelization efforts, and principals have embraced and strengthened the unique charisms of each school, she says.

St. Thomas More Catholic Academy, in the Southeast section of the District that has a particularly grim crime record, reflects the Consortium’s mission to provide safe and values-filled communities where all children can learn, she says.

That mission also drives St. Francis Xavier Academy and St. Anthony Catholic School (which, like St. Thomas, have mostly African American students), and Sacred Heart School, which offers a bilingual program for its majority of Hispanic students.

As the only Consortium school in the District’s crime-ridden Ward 8, St. Thomas stands out as a “beacon,” Conley says. “You walk into the school, and you would not know [the local crime reputation]. These kids are amazing. They’re polite, they’re poised, they want to be there. It’s such a great feeling.” Virtually all St. Thomas students apply and gain admission to Catholic high schools, she says.

These and other statistics show the Consortium helps to provide a high-quality education to disadvantaged children. Some 51% of Consortium students are being raised in single parent homes, and 41% of students’ families live at or below the poverty line. Funding supplied by the archdiocese, by benefactors, and by vouchers through Washington’s local school-choice law, as well as through modest tuition fees, has made this education more accessible for the Consortium’s approximately 800 current students, but Conley says there are still many families who can’t afford to give their children these benefits.

One of the challenges Conley points to is the fact that many children of the middle and lower-middle class, who are not eligible for DC’s opportunity scholarships, cannot afford these schools. A growing number of charter schools, charging no tuition, draw in families who otherwise would choose a Catholic education. The Consortium’s development and fund-raising efforts will need to examine this challenge to extend accessibility to more of this population.

Conley also sees professional development of educators as an area of growing aspirations in which she and her principals are collaborating. She has brought in coaches with whom teachers—both the veterans and beginners—can work regularly in the classrooms, especially in math but expanding to other subjects. This hands-on professional development holds much more benefit than conventional, occasional sessions, she says, and it represents another Consortium characteristic that deserves attention in additional schools.

Freedom from many business-side concerns also allows principals to focus more on each school’s charism and its distinctive Catholic character. Conley says this is important partly because a unique identity makes a school more closely-knit, encouraging parents and everyone to “invest in that community.” She adds that parent’s attendance at meetings to discuss each school’s status and sustainability has increased as the tone has moved toward all community members having a part to play.

But strengthening the schools’ Catholic identity is not a simple matter when two-thirds of the Consortium’s students come from non-Catholic households. Again, Conley says, she has worked with principals to set the general goal while allowing each school to tailor its own approach. At St. Anthony School, where most of the teachers are Catholic, the principal has moved toward having all of his teachers become certified catechists whether they teach religion or not.

Regardless of the degree to which schools adopt catechist certification, the Consortium’s structured discussion about religious values has helped teachers of all faiths accept and build an awareness of the Catholic Christian mission in their schools.

“It’s creating a culture and context where there are commonalities, and we’re all saying the same message,” Conley says.

The Consortium model, which has been evolving in the Archdiocese of Washington for nearly 20 years, has proven the strength of governance that separates business duties from the daily tasks of a learning community, Conley says, and many other schools would benefit from this approach. But it has to take different forms, responsive to pastors’ and principals’ varying perspectives and needs. Learning, professional development, fund-raising, and accessibility all seem to benefit from a combination of local school flexibility and a structure that drives both common initiatives and innovations, she says.

Washington’s Consortium of Catholic Academies is hardly a one-size-fits-all prescription for all Catholic schools, Conley says. But it highlights ways in which the Church can “get ahead” of declining enrollment while sustaining its commitment to educate children from all backgrounds.

The stakes are high, both at the level of cities and society and at the level of the individual student. Conley asks, “What is the impact on the District of Columbia? I’m a third-generation DC native, and I see it. I see what a Consortium school can do.  When you hear the kids talking about their experience, I think it speaks volumes.”