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Kevin Kijewski’s journey to becoming superintendent of schools for the Archdiocese of Denver has been anything but straightforward. From high school teacher in Denver as part of ACE Teaching Fellows, to law school, to a term as Dean of Business Administration at a small college in Michigan before serving as associate superintendent in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, and finally back to Denver, his path has been roundabout. His mission for Catholic schools in Denver, however, is as direct as possible.“I want to create a model here in Denver that’s going to make Catholic schools sustainable, make them grow, and predominantly, help kids get to heaven.”

Kijewski is the seventh graduate of one of the Alliance for Catholic Education’s (ACE) formation programs to serve as superintendent of schools for an (arch)diocese, and he said his emphasis as superintendent, a post he begins full-time on July 1, will focus on three key goals.

“It’s all about growth, innovation, and leadership,” he said. “That’s what we have to do.”

In order to fulfill these goals, Kijewski said he knows he needs strong leaders in his schools. These leaders need to have a growth mindset, while also making sure schools do not lose any of their Catholic identity.

“With Catholic schools leaders, I’m looking for a few things,” he said. “First, someone who is definitely Catholic, able to evangelize and live out his or her faith. Second, someone with very rigorous academic goals, not only for the actual students in the classroom, but someone who is able to facilitate academic goal-setting with his or her staff. In short, I look for someone who is faith-filled, supports academic rigor, and that has solid preparation.”

Catholic identity is something Kijewski takes very seriously, and he said he wants to make sure that the schools in Denver remain on being Catholic schools. “We’re Catholic for a reason, and we have to be very proud of that,” he said. “We should not attempt to hide it. Being Catholic doesn’t mean that we have to just talk about being a good secular human, or talking about morals, but really trying to engage in the New Evangelization for those who are already Catholic. And for those who are not Catholic, it means showing them exactly what the Church is about and to welcome them and show them the rich, intellectual tradition of the Catholic faith.

Kijewski said accomplishing another of his three goals—growth—is tied together closely with ministering to the Latino population in Denver, who make up a large section of the Catholic population but not of those enrolled in Catholic schools. “When you take a look at Catholic school enrollment for Latinos, it’s relatively low and needs to go way up,” he said. “It’s not just because it’s the future of our Church. It’s a civil rights issue. We have to figure out ways to be more hospitable and welcoming, but also find ways of fitting into their culture.“If we’re able to appropriately serve—both academically and spiritually—the Latino community, we’re going to be able to increase the sustainability and viability of our Catholic schools. It’s a win-win proposition.”

Kijewski said that all his efforts, and the efforts of those who work in Catholic schools, should be rooted in one core belief.“Fundamentally, a Catholic school is a way to get kids to heaven; it creates saints for this life and the next,” he said.

Read more about Kevin's appointment on the Archdiocese of Denver website.

Photo credit: Julie Filby, Denver Catholic

Parental choice among schools has proven "poverty need not be destiny" for children, and it's time to build upon that progress with new initiatives, K-12 education leader Marc Sternberg told a Notre Dame audience Feb. 24.

Sternberg, director of the Walton Family Foundation's K-12 Education Program, outlined additional steps to ensure a high-quality education for all students. Those steps include expanded parental choice, a wider range of school models, improved development of educators, and "consequential accountability" among schools.

[tweetable]"We need to grow quality seats ambitiously, and we need to eliminate underperforming seats judiciously,"[/tweetable] Sternberg said as he delivered the inaugural Notre Dame Lecture on Education Policy, sponsored by the University's Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE). The lecture, titled "The Next Stage of Transforming Education," drew a large audience to Remick Commons in Visitation Hall.

A former teacher and educational leader, Sternberg noted the importance of Catholic schools among the mix of traditional public school, charter school, and private school sectors which the Walton Family Foundation sees generating both quality and choice in under-served urban neighborhoods.

"We believe that Catholic schools, with their strong history in these communities, are integral to serving these communities well," Sternberg said.

He praised ACE as an important contributor, through initiatives supported by the foundation and others, to excellence and accessibility in Catholic schools. "[ACE] is one of the bright examples we can point to across sectors of the kind of hands-on work directly improving schools and outcomes."

Sternberg said the foundation's goals are expanding. It will spend more than $1 billion over five years to expand school quality in 13 cities.

"We need to explore a next generation of school models," as well as new ways to develop educators with "the talent to make the school models real and possible," he said

Some 3.5 million students in the United States currently attend charter schools and publicly supported private schools, Sternberg said, adding that the foundation hopes the number will rise to 10 million in the next decade.

"You will hear people say that education is the civil rights movement of today," he said. "That is not rhetoric or hyperbole."

When Jenni Crain looks back on her year of study in ACE’s English as a New Language (ENL) program, she is reminded of the feeling of looking out her classroom window and seeing the house where her grandparents lived.

Crain teaches first grade at St. Adalbert Catholic School in South Bend, Ind., a school vibrant with the energy of growing Latino enrollment. When the parish and school were founded in 1910, though, this part of town housed many of the new Polish immigrants. Her mother and grandfather both went to the school, supported in the challenge of learning a language that was foreign to her grandfather.

“It’s a completely different culture and nationality today, but it’s kind of the same story,” Crain recalls. “One hundred and four years later, parents are still scraping together pennies to support their ENL students on the west side of South Bend.” 

Catholic schools’ ongoing legacy of welcoming and enriching newcomers gives Crain not only a sense of accomplishment spanning her ten years at St. Adalbert, but also a sense of solidarity with ACE’s strong spirit of community. That’s what she experienced in 2010-2011 as a member of the ENL cohort, combining coursework with uninterrupted teaching careers. She and educators from around the country prepared for licensure in key language pedagogy skills—an experience she now would recommend “absolutely, a hundred times over.”

These ENL participants faced their own concerns and challenges of adjustment as they began the program, Crain recalls. She was worried about being able to afford the program on a teacher’s salary. She wondered if she could manage extra academics amid the schooldays at St. Adalbert when teachers “wear a lot of hats”—supervising students’ extracurricular activities, for example.

Crain found that the ACE team at the helm of the program, her ENL classmates, and her principal and colleagues at St. Adalbert all came together to encourage her and to make everything possible.

“I couldn’t come up with a worry that the ENL leaders couldn’t answer,” she says. “There wasn’t any situation they weren’t willing to work with me on.”

The Catholic school educators who gathered on campus to enter the program in summer 2010 soon realized they shared experiences in common and formed a mutually supportive community.

As Jenni’s venue for the curriculum moved back to St. Adalbert in the fall and spring, the school community showed strong support, too. Cooperation and schedule adjustments made the studies doable, Crain says. Moreover, many ENL assignments involved activities in the classroom, “so, rather than creating a ton more work for a busy teacher, the coursework helped me to better focus the work I was already doing.”

ACE’s approach, unlike a conventional collegiate program, is planned with the classroom teacher’s schedule in mind.

That design advantage goes even deeper, Crain says.

“It was clear from the day we arrived that Christ was the reason for the program; better serving his children was the goal. Even on the tough days, that keeps you moving in the right direction.” 

Crain says she’s enjoyed the program’s benefits year after year. Ideas and insights she learned proved applicable right away and ever since.

She had enrolled with ACE not only to benefit the students who needed the most ENL help, but also to avoid shortchanging those in her class with lesser language needs who still deserved her time and attention. Equipped with efficient and effective techniques and with know-how broadly suited for teaching languages, Crain discovered that “better serving my lowest learners was what was best for all of my kids.”

The ENL program has made her classroom a better reflection of the Catholic legacy that transcends time and societal change, just as St. Adalbert School has done between 1910 and 2015, and now into the future.

“I have a lot more confidence with the cultural aspects of my job,” Crain says. “My classroom is much more inclusive of different learning styles. Overall, the bar has been raised—both for me and my kids.”

To learn more about the English as a New Language Program, please visit enl.nd.edu or start your application by clicking the button below.

Begin an Application

At St. Luke Catholic School in Palm Springs, Fla., STEM isn’t just a catchy acronym for the students work in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. STEM has become a new way of thinking, of teaching, and of learning.

“When a student says they don’t understand, as a teacher you want to go in and point them in the right direction,” Principal Sue Sandelier said. “With [a STEM-based approach], you don’t do that; you question them and lead them to where they can figure it out. As teachers and as professionals, we’re really reflecting on how to integrate that as a faculty, and we’re supporting each other.”

Sandelier said it’s amazing how far they have come in such a short time, since it was less than two years ago that someone from the Diocese of Palm Beach approached leaders from St. Luke and Cardinal Newman High School about incorporating STEM practices into their curriculum. 

“During that time, we were talking with the high school [leaders] and they said, ‘We’d like to learn a little bit more about STEM and how we can move forward with that for our students,’” she said. “And I said, ‘I think that would be a great thing and great possibility.’ I didn’t realize the ground we’d be breaking with STEM.”

The superintendent of the diocese, Gary Gelo, put Sandelier in touch with Dr. Matt Kloser, the director of the University of Notre Dame’s Center for STEM Education. Kloser traveled to Palm Springs and hosted a visioning session with the local community, sharing with parents, teachers, and school leaders the importance and power of a well-rounded STEM education.

“From there, we really jumped into the deep end,” Sandelier said. “We have not stopped paddling since. Doing a lot of research in STEM, we began to quickly realize that we needed to make sure teachers were on board, that teachers felt comfortable in doing it, and how we could explore different programs to bring STEM into our classrooms.”

After a successful trial run with the first unit of the Engineering in Elementary curriculum, developed by the Museum of Science in Boston, St. Luke’s faculty decided to fully incorporate STEM into their curriculum. They adopted Project Lead the Way in grades K-5 and Carolina Curriculum’s Science and Technology Concepts program for the middle school.

“We’re having a lot of success with . . . solid C/B students who now seem to embrace that idea of looking for exploration, and they see a purpose to their learning,” Diann Bacchus, St. Luke’s middle school science teacher, said. Bacchus also serves as the STEM coordinator for the whole school. “I just completed my first entirely STEM-based unit, and the assessments for my sixth and eighth graders really showed that they were able to take it to the next level, and understand that I’m not just telling them what to learn, they’re exploring and telling me, and I’m more of their guide.”

St. Luke also hosted a summer robotics camp hosted by the Notre Dame STEM Center, and Bacchus said her students still talk about the concepts they learned at the camp and incorporate them into their work. Bacchus also started a STEM club and is taking twenty students to compete at a local engineering competition.

“The kids are clamoring to be a part of this,” she said. “I think a lot of that comes back to the camps we did because the kids see that it’s learning, but it’s learning in a fun way. They did more with the camp than I ever thought they would do with it, and still talk about it.”

Sandelier said that everyone in the St. Luke community—teachers, students, and parents—has embraced the incorporation of STEM into the curriculum, and that the results have been overwhelmingly positive. 

“The first grade teacher was doing the kindergarten Project Lead the Way program with her students, and they had designed a paintbrush that they were then going to use after Christmas,” Sandelier said. “When they came back from break, the teacher had set up an art center. One little girl came over to her and said, ‘I’m going to be an engineer and redo my paint brush, because it didn’t work the first time, so I want to do it again.’ That was unsolicited; it was just her thought process where the program and her teacher had led her.”

To learn more about about Notre Dame’s efforts to improve STEM education, please visit stemeducation.nd.edu, or apply to become a Trustey Family STEM Teaching Fellow by clicking the button below.

Begin an Application

The Catholic News Service recently visited ACE Teachers and Remick Leaders in Chicago, the Notre Dame ACE Academies in Tucson, and several team members at ACE's home at the University of Notre Dame. The following articles and videos offer an inside glimpse into our work to sustain, strengthen, and transform Catholic schools across the country.

Part I: Notre Dame's ACE: Putting kids on the path to college -- and heaven
Article and Video

Part II: Three Arizona Catholic schools saved after Notre Dame advisers step in
Article and Video

Part III: Notre Dame ACE's Teacher Formation Modeled on Religious Community
Article and Video

The package of coverage also features a video on the mariachi program at St. John the Evangelist and an article on principal, Keiran Roche.