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The call started before Notre Dame, before seminarian Geoffrey Mooney knew much about Blessed Basil Moreau, the Congregation of Holy Cross, or Moreau’s “flame of burning desire which one feels to make God known, loved, and served.” The call came before he spent five years teaching high school in a city in which he never dreamed of living.

But through his time at Notre Dame as an undergraduate, as a teacher in Pensacola, FL with ACE Teaching Fellows, and inspired by the confidence others gave him to pursue his vocation, Geoffrey Mooney found his way back to Notre Dame, filled with the zeal of Fr. Moreau.

“I first thought about the priesthood while in high school, but admittedly refused to consider it too seriously,” Mooney said.

But Notre Dame provided him with opportunities to cultivate his faith life, through daily Mass, Eucharistic adoration, and through his interactions with the Holy Cross priests on campus.

“I might not have recognized it fully at the time, but witnessing my dorm community gathering for the Eucharist each week and joining the larger Notre Dame and Holy Cross communities for campus celebrations had a profound impact on my undergraduate years and my own discernment,” he said.

That zeal manifested itself in a passion for serving in Catholic schools. He was accepted into ACE Teaching Fellows, and upon graduation from Notre Dame, traveled to Pensacola to become a high school teacher.

“When I first learned about ACE in my sophomore year, I knew I was being called to join and become a teacher,” Mooney said. “I felt that was where God was leading me after graduation. As it turns out, I fell in love with teaching.”

Mooney immersed himself into Pensacola, teaching, coaching, and throwing himself into the local parish community as well. His much smaller ACE community also provided a place where Mooney could grow in his faith.

“I credit my housemates with encouraging me always to be my best professionally, but also challenging me to share myself, my faith,” Mooney said. “It was somewhere between my small ACE community and my larger school and parish communities in Pensacola that I increasingly felt the tug to consider the priesthood more seriously.”

Mooney spent two years in Pensacola as part of ACE, and then stayed for an additional three years at his post at Pensacola Catholic High School. While his ACE community members were gone, the local community continued to lead Mooney toward his vocation.

“In relationships with faculty members, students, and local families, I began to see clearly my gifts—enthusiasm, encouragement of others, ability to listen, desire to share the faith and proclaim God’s love,” he said.

After a discernment retreat in Rome at the end of 2012, Mooney said he began to consider more seriously the idea of returning to Notre Dame and entering Moreau Seminary. At the culmination of the 2013-14 school year, and through the encouragement of his students and fellow teachers, Mooney made his decision.

“I remember vividly the afternoon in April that I received the phone call inviting me to join Holy Cross,” he said. “My years in the classroom, founded firmly on my Notre Dame education, provided the grace-filled momentum God knew I needed to take that next step in coming to Holy Cross."

As the oldest member of his seminary class at Notre Dame, Mooney knows well that the call to religious life can come in various ways. For him, it came through his time in Catholic schools.

"I do not regret a single step in my journey of discernment," Mooney said. "I carry with me my years serving the youth of our Catholic schools and the relationships I fostered along the way—God willing, these will only continue to inform my formation in Holy Cross and make me a priest committed to that same zeal of Fr. Moreau.”

One oft-asked question has prompted the Catholic schools in the Diocese of Sacramento to re-imagine how they use assessment data to increase student achievement. The inquiry, typically made when parents are comparing possible schools for their young children, goes like this:

"Can you prove your school will be the best option for keeping our kids 'on track to be college- and career-ready?'" said Rick Maya, who was compelled to take action on this inquiry during his service as diocesan schools superintendent.

Maya believes, and research supports, that a student’s path to college begins in the early grades, so he prompted his school leadership team to roll out a system of interim and end-of-year assessments for each student—spanning third grade through high school.

Strong ACT college entrance test scores already reveal that the average student in diocesan high schools has been well prepared for future studies. “But for that graduate, the journey started in the first grade,” said Maya. He pushed his team to map each student's entire journey from enrollment to graduation. Although Maya completed five years as superintendent on Dec. 31, he said he believes that the “big data” plan will help prove the oft-sited "Catholic school advantage” to a new generation of parents.  

Sacramento is one of the first dioceses in the country to sign on with a comprehensive system of testing to track elementary and secondary school performance. Under a new “Aspire” brand being phased in, incremental tests will start at the end of third grade and follow students all the way up to the ACT college entrance exam. Each year’s results will reveal patterns of an individual’s learning to illustrate the track that culminated in the levels of college-readiness tallied in the ACT.

“Eventually, we’ll be able to look at a successful high school junior and backwards-map to see where they were—what track they were on way back in third grade,” said Laurie Power, chief academic officer and now the driving force for the Sacramento Diocese’s unfolding strategy.

Parents will value these year-end tests as indicators of where their children stand in relation to the path toward eventual college-readiness, Power said. Educators benefit, too; a sixth-grade teacher, for example, can receive a report that eighty-six percent of his or her class is on the trajectory to be college-ready. Teachers sharing these data points will be able to adjust their class-wide and individualized approaches to boost that percentage.

Kim Doyle, one of the diocese’s regional school superintendents working with Power, said her experience tells her few school systems take this data-driven, trajectory approach; instead, they test for proficiency based on statewide standards. The norms are geared toward each grade level rather than a bigger picture—the ultimate goals of college and career.

“In other schools, the ACT test comes in at the high school junior level, but by that time, for some, it’s too late,” she said. “Low-performing students have had fewer opportunities for course corrections at an early age.

So far, after two years of phasing in the Aspire system, fifth- and sixth-graders throughout the diocese have begun taking those tests. The news for Sacramento is good, said Power. “Across all five subjects—English, Reading, Writing, Science, and Math—our students have well outperformed the national average, by fifteen percentage points in English in some cases.”

But the goal-oriented ACT assessments are only part of the transformation Maya originated and the leadership team is extending under the authority of Sacramento Bishop Jaime Soto. An additional system of formative assessments, conducted every nine weeks, is helping teachers monitor how individual students master the Math and English content prescribed for every nine-week module throughout the diocese.

A lot of data is generated, requiring constant interpretations and responses, so teachers have varied in their reactions to these formative assessments. The empowerment from the data is “really unique from a diocesan perspective,” said Doyle, because educators can now monitor how fifth graders across multiple schools are learning the prescribed content for each segment of the year. They can see subject areas where they could teach better, students could learn better, and some bundles of content could be reassessed in consultation among colleagues.

“The schools using the formative data most effectively have leaders who created grade-level data teams,” said Power. In some schools, third, fourth, and fifth grade teachers gather to look at interim results and can consider modifying their instruction or developing extra resources for students if weak spots appear consistently in certain areas of learning.

Occasional resistance to these data-driven adjustments has emerged during the first three years from teachers concerned about the effectiveness of the approach, but the leadership team team is aware that an adjustment period will be necessary. Teachers and students alike can use the system for self-improvement, Power said.

“Have we seen it become more embraced and better used? Yes.”

Maya said his term as superintendent convinced him Sacramento needed more comprehensive testing. This data reflects the Catholic school advantage, a faith-based opportunity to overcome the achievement gap hindering too many inner-city youths.

“If we can bring the data to the conversation, then we can move from educating less than five percent of Catholic youth to doubling that overnight—if we prove what we all believe.”

Since 2010, when a devastating earthquake hit Léogâne, Haiti, sixteen miles west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital, ACE has sought to support and revitalize Haitian Catholic education through a number of multifaceted initiatives. In remembrance of the five-year anniversary of the disaster, members of the ACE team and their partners in Haiti sat down to reflect on their experiences surrounding the earthquake that rocked a nation just 400 miles off the coast of Florida.

Fr. Tim Scully, CSC, Hackett Family Director of the Institute for Educational Initiatives: I had two initial causes of my interest and involvement in Haiti. The first one was Fr. Tom Streit, who started the Notre Dame Haiti Program. Tom would ask me to advise him on fundraising for his efforts in Haiti and had invited me to go to Haiti with him. The second was our connection to the Congregation of Holy Cross, which has served in Haiti for over 70 years.

Fr. Michel Eugene, CSC, Provincial Superior, the Haitian Province of the Congregation of Holy Cross: The Congregation of Holy Cross was called to Haiti many times and accepted a mission devoted to education here in 1944. It has been here for 70 years. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, we focused our efforts on youth education.

T.J. D’Agostino, Associate Director of Haitian Catholic Education Initiatives: I got involved in Haiti through my best friend from Notre Dame, Don Zimmer. He volunteered in Haiti for a year after graduating from ND before going to medical school and had encouraged me to visit Haiti with him. In 2006, when I was 23 and in my second year as a teacher in the ACE program, I went to Haiti with Don. It was a life altering experience.

Gena Robinson: I first met T.J. in Haiti when I was teaching as a volunteer there. I was a recent college grad and he and a good friend of his had come down to Haiti and came to visit my school. I remember T.J. saying, “Would you be able to have a follow up phone call?” And we pointed to the phone poll, which had the wires duct-taped to it, and we pointed to the guard, and we were like, “He goes up and duct tapes them every time they fall down.”

T.J. D’Agostino: I had been to some Latin American countries, some poorer countries, but I hadn’t experienced the depth of poverty and human suffering that I witnessed in Haiti. It was difficult to wrap my head around - everything from a complete lack of infrastructure to totally dysfunctional institutions. It was hard to know how to even begin to engage.

Fr. Rosemond Marcelin, CSC, Principal of Basile Moreau School: The situation wasn’t good in Haiti before the earthquake. The state was weak and poorly structured. There was a lot of political instability.

Fr. Tim Scully: There was the famous meeting in Notre Dame’s Main Building when I was trying to help Tom acquire support for his work in Haiti from the central administration. It was the year T.J. was graduating from ACE and he literally had his cap and gown, and I came down from that meeting and I met TJ in front of the Golden Dome.

T.J. D’Agostino: The weekend I graduated from ACE, I had a conversation with Fr. Scully in which I was expressing an interest and a desire to work in Haiti, and he had just walked out of a meeting in which he had been asked if he could do more to support Haiti.

Fr. Tim Scully: Tom had just asked me in this meeting, “What are you doing for Haiti?” I thought to myself, “We haven’t done anything for Haiti. What do you want me to do?” But then with classic Irish guilt, it was bothering me that I didn’t have a better answer. So minutes after the meeting I run into T.J. who was literally with his cap and gown on his arm, and I said to him, “T.J., what are you going to do when you graduate from ACE?” He said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do, but whatever it is, it has to have something to do with Haiti.” I said, “Really? You want to work on something in Haiti?” “Yeah. Haiti and education.” Here, T.J. gave me the answer.

While Notre Dame and ACE were ramping up their efforts in Haiti, others were doing the same, and had been for years.

Fr. Michel Eugene, CSC: Holy Cross in Haiti also worked in informal education, most notably in the field of adult education by developing two nationally renowned training institutes: At IDEA, we began the National Literacy Project (Mission Alpha.)  The project aimed, in time, to wipe out illiteracy across the country.

Kate Schuenke-Lucien, Associate Director of Haitian Catholic Education Initiatives: I grew up in the Evangelical Free Church. My parents, through a connection, went to Haiti to volunteer on a project with a gentleman named Henoc Lucien. I had known Henoc, and my parents had been going to Haiti since I was twelve years old. My mom was really involved in education through this mission in Haiti.

Gena Robinson, Marketing and Communications Specialist for Play Like a Champion Today: I actually first got involved in Haiti as a senior at Notre Dame. I took a Haitian Creole class. I just thought it would be a fun thing to learn. At the end of my senior year I found out about the Haitian Project, and I ended up teaching in Haiti for a year after I graduated from college.

Kate Schuenke-Lucien: When I was in college I was in a really bad car accident. I was hurt really badly, and my mom was killed. For her memorial, we requested that all of the gifts in memory of her go toward helping to finish the school she had been working on through the Evangelical Free Church and Henoc in Cap-Haitien.

It was what they needed to finish building the school, so the board of directors of the school said that they wanted to name it after her. It’s a pre-K through twelfth grade school in Cap-Haitien, and it’s named College Susan Schuenke.

When I graduated from college, the [College Susan Schuenke] leadership asked if I would come to help them with the school and to teach English and Spanish for all the kids. I lived in Haiti from 2002 to 2003, and that is where I met my husband, Fredo.

Fr. Tim Scully: I’ve got to tell you, going to Haiti for the first time was a real revelation. It was poor. I’ve been working in Latin America for many years, probably thirty-five years, but nothing like the poverty I saw in Haiti.

Kate Schuenke-Lucien: I had never been to a place where the physical needs were so great and yet the morale and the ability to put one foot in front of another for all of my students and their families was so great as well.

Gena Robinson: When I was there, it was very unstable. There were routine kidnappings and prison breaks. There was political upheaval. Despite the chaos that was outside the school walls, my students were an amazing group that were committed to making their country better.

Fr. Michel Eugene, CSC: In 2009, realizing the rapid growth of our province, we decided to prioritize education over the coming years, with a special focus on teacher training.

Gena Robinson: When I was teaching in Haiti, I was on the emergency planning committee. We planned for armed invasions, we planned for hurricanes and for floods, and we planned for earthquakes. It was basically a duck, cover, hold on, and leave the building as quickly as possible plan. The students were like, “You silly Americans, you and your drills. Okay. You’re telling us we miss five minutes of class if we do this, right?”

In the late afternoon on Tuesday, January 12, 2010, a catastrophic earthquake rocked Haiti, the epicenter just sixteen miles west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital.

T.J. D’Agostino: I was planning on being at the Clinton Foundation on January 14th. President Clinton was hosting the meeting about Haiti’s long-term development and I was going to represent Notre Dame to talk about our plans to work with Holy Cross around teacher training. But the earthquake hit on January 12th and everything changed.

Gena Robinson: The day of the earthquake, I was living back in South Bend, working at the Red Cross.

Kate Schuenke-Lucien: My husband had just returned a couple days before the earthquake. He had been in Port-au-Prince visiting family. I was driving and my friend called me and said, “Where is Fredo? Is he back from Haiti yet?” “I knew something really bad had happened, and we turned on the radio. I knew at that point it was something bad, but that night there still was not a lot of information coming out. I called my husband in Chicago and literally he couldn’t speak. He doesn’t cry. He couldn’t speak for crying.

T.J. D’Agostino: The earthquake happened and I - like a lot of people - was devastated by the things that I was seeing on TV—the images, the stories, the things people were going through. I was worried about my friends and colleagues in Haiti, whether they had survived.

Fr. Rosemond Marcelin, CSC: I was in my room at the seminary on the day of the earthquake, I had just eaten and gone up to my room and turned on my computer. I heard a loud noise and I thought someone was working on top of the roof. My desk started to move and all my books from my bookshelf and my computer fell on the floor. My door closed and locked, and I was so frightened I couldn't even think to unlock it. I just kicked it down to run outside. Everything was falling down around me in the room. I heard so many loud noises because buildings were falling down all around me. The part of the seminary building I was in didn’t fall down but other parts collapsed. When I got outside there was so much dust in the air, I couldn't see. We spent 3 days sleeping on the street with all of the people from the neighborhood. My mom was so scared that I died, a friend was able to call and tell her I was ok, but my mom didn't believe it and I had to go home to see her so she would believe I was alive.

Fr. Michel Eugene, CSC: I was brutally woken up by the earthquake, along with most of my fellow countrymen. I buried my dead friends and family along with the rest of Port-au-Prince and got back to work. As someone with a doctoral degree in clinical psychology, I was able to help begin an initiative to provide psychological support to the most vulnerable. There was immense trauma.

Fr. Rosemond Marcelin, CSC: For me, after the earthquake, I felt like life didn’t have any sense anymore, life was so difficult already. People had so little and then they lost what little they had. I was very discouraged. I lost my cousin. I lost my best friend from seminary who died at Quisqueya University.

Kate Schuenke-Lucien: Fredo was trying to find his sisters who live in Port-au-Prince, his sisters and his brother. It was terrible because he knew that they were alive, but he didn’t know what had happened. The next day he was able to finally get through, and he found out that his sister had been in her house in Port au Prince and she felt the earthquake starting to happen, so she grabbed her two toddlers and was running out of the house. As she was running, she pushed them in front of her, but her sliding glass door broke and it pinned her down. She was stuck in the house. By the grace of God, my husband’s brother had been coming over to visit, and he got there right as everything was happening, so he ran in and he pulled the door off of her and pulled her out. Then a minute later, the entire house pancaked.

T.J. D’Agostino: Some weeks later I learned that my friend and colleague, the head of the national office for Catholic schools in Haiti, was badly injured. He was in the second floor of a building that collapsed. The woman with him, who had dedicated her life to Haitian Catholic education, died. He broke both of his hips and was hurt badly. Thank God, he recovered fully and continues to be our close partner.

Kate Schuenke-Lucien: I also remember thinking, “Haiti has been through so many things, what kind of God is this?” I remember that was what my husband kept saying to me on the phone. That night he said, “Why? Why would God let this happen? Have we not been through enough?”

Fr. Michel Eugene, CSC: There were all of the emotions brought on by the earthquake and the experience of such a disaster. I realized how vulnerable and inconsequential we all are. We knew the risks of an earthquake were real, but we didn’t really believe them until the night of January 12, 2010.

Gena Robinson: The next day I went in to work and because of my experience in Haiti became the Red Cross’s person on Haiti for the region. I was handling people who wanted to go to Haiti, people who had questions about Haiti, wanted to donate to Haiti, local news organizations who wanted to get some context on Haiti.

T.J. D’Agostino: Two days after the earthquake, they ended up having the meeting at the Clinton Foundation in NYC and I went out there. It was surreal. The UN headquarters in Haiti had collapsed, and almost every ministry building had collapsed, the presidential palace had collapsed, so none of the typical infrastructure to respond to a crisis like this was left standing in Haiti. President Clinton was then the UN Special Envoy to Haiti, and decisions were literally being made in that meeting about how to get help and aid into the country and how to avoid an even greater humanitarian catastrophe due to logistical challenges and the failure of getting aid to the people who needed it.

Gena Robinson: The Friday after the earthquake, I got a call. It was the final tally of who had died from my school. We lost five people, and many of my students lost family members. We thought we lost six, but one of my former students was stuck under the rubble and she got out. She was pulled out after four days of being stuck under her school. She survived.

Kate Schuenke-Lucien: When the earthquake happened, there was no way to coordinate things. Before the earthquake Haiti had a weak central government, and then you had this huge crisis where you need a central authority and nobody was there to organize things. I think that became clear in immediately after the earthquake, food being sent to the wrong places, etc. So many people had such good intentions, but there was no way to logically funnel their good intentions into achievable outcomes.

Gena Robinson: It was a time of immense chaos. Haiti was very chaotic before the earthquake. Then, when you added in this new level of absolute natural disaster on a country that was already very, very unstable, the chaos was just unimaginable.

T.J. D’Agostino: Within the days following the earthquake, we learned that the Holy Cross community had suffered major losses—they lost the life of a seminarian, they lost their provincial administration building and one of their flagship schools, Basile Moreau, completely collapsed. It was soon after the earthquake that, Fr. Scully and Fr. Warner, in consultation with the Haitian Holy Cross Community, decided to help rebuild Basile Moreau as a top priority and to move forward with our plans for teacher training.

Fr. Tim Scully: I went down to Haiti with Fr. John Jenkins just over a month after the earthquake. I decided to spend time with our Holy Cross community to explore ways we could help support them. I was there for a couple of days. When I came back, I said, “T.J., we’ve got to do something.”

Read more with Part 2 here.

The second part in ACE's look back at its work in Haiti in remembrance of the 2010 earthquake the struck the nation. Check out Part 1 here.

* * *

After the initial chaos in the days after the earthquake, Haiti quickly had to identify what steps needed to be taken to move forward.

Fr. Tim Scully: We decided to be pretty aggressive about helping. I remember getting a list of my forty best friends in terms of benefactors. People were extraordinarily generous. Between that and a few other sources, we were able to put together a fund with five or six million dollars.

Fr. Michel Eugene, CSC: The Province of Haiti has strengthened relations with the US Province, primarily through the Holy Cross Mission Center and Notre Dame. During the first few weeks after the earthquake, Fr. Timothy Scully and ACE became our main contact person and our main contact institution at Notre Dame. Since then, we have realized many hopes and new projects. Through ACE, we were able to benefit from Notre Dame’s expertise in education.

Gena Robinson: The outpouring was amazing. People walked in with their paychecks. A little girl walked in with her piggy bank. Classes and schools raised money for Haiti. I went to a lot of local schools to tell them about Haiti, and they’d do every dress down day that they could to give to kids who needed it, to give to these people who were right in our backyard who had suffered so unimaginably.

Kate Schuenke-Lucien: You need to feed people. You need to have medical care. But if you want those systems to last for the long-term, you have to be thoughtful and reflective about it and really be sure you’re putting your resources in appropriate areas that are going to last for the long-term.

Fr. Tim Scully: The big thing about getting involved in all this construction stuff in Haiti is you just don’t know people. Frankly, there’s an awful lot of corruption. We were dealing with several million dollars. [Fellow University Trustee] Ken Stinson, who was in the construction business, told me, “You have to meet Michael Gay.” He owns the largest cement plant in Haiti, and he also is one of the largest builders in Haiti. He responded favorably to our request, and he became our builder.

T.J. D’Agostino: It took a little while to get going. The rebuilding was complicated, and finding the right partners to build a new high-quality infrastructure that was built according to seismic standards took some time.

Fr. Tim Scully: I had one thing to say to T.J. every time I saw him. I just said, “Rubble.” Our school properties were just full of rubble. T.J. wanted to talk about teacher training and principal training, and I’m like, “Rubble.”

T.J. D’Agostino: Basile Moreau is now rebuilt. It’s twice the size as before the earthquake, serving nearly twice as many students. It has a beautified campus that’s in the final stages of being complete. It was already a beautiful place in contrast to the slum neighborhood where it is located. Now it is an amazing haven for the children and the community.

Gena Robinson: I saw Basile Moreau a couple years ago when it was just about done, and I’d seen pictures right after the fall. It’s an amazing school. It is beautiful and safe.

T.J. D’Agostino: One third of the students at Basile Moreau go to school completely free because their parents can’t afford tuition. All students get two meals a day, and extensive services, and every single one of them passes the national exam needed to have access to college and beyond. The school performs, and has since before the earthquake, at the level of the elite schools in Port-au-Prince. And for a few years after the earthquake while the school was being rebuilt, they continued to provide a fantastic education to their students while teaching and learning in tents. Now they have a beautiful space in which to learn and grow.

Outside of rebuilding, T.J. and the ACE leadership still believed that ACE could help Haiti with teacher training, since this was a Holy Cross priority and seventy percent of teachers in Haiti lacked teaching credentials.

T.J. D’Agostino: In terms of finding our way with [teacher training], this part was complicated at first. After the earthquake, Haiti was a little like the Wild West. So many people had come in, but it was too many people and it was complicated for Haitian leaders to coordinate. Articulating the right projects with solid plans and the right partners was key to our success. Eventually we articulated a strong plan with our partners in Holy Cross and helped them found a training institute in the North of Haiti.

Fr. Michel Eugene, CSC: The development of the Marcel Bedard Institute. The institute must train teachers according to a modern approach which is more scientific and adapted to the needs of Haiti and is on track. We are in the third year of piloting this program.

T.J. D’Agostino: After starting the teacher-training project, we became aware of the challenges facing Catholic schools in Haiti more broadly. We ended up having a conversation with the President of the Haitian Bishops Conference, and we were concerned when we realized that the Church didn’t know the scope of the damage to Catholic schools or have a plan for rebuilding.

Fr. Tim Scully: We completed the rebuilding of Basile Moreau School, which led to a broader involvement in teacher training. With the grant we got from the Jones-Day Foundation, we started a teacher training effort with our Haitian Holy Cross community, and other foundations got involved. Then we ended up doing a large study and strategic plan for Haiti’s 2,400 Catholic schools, which got the Kellogg Foundation involved.

T.J. D’Agostino: We suggested to the Archbishop, “If you have a really good plan with good data, Catholic education can lead the way for rebuilding and improving quality system-wide.”  He just looked at us and said: “I think you’re totally right. I hope you will help us with that.”  This led to ACE, Catholic Relief Services and the Haitian Church completing a large-scale study and national planning effort, and has become an inflection point for our work in Haiti.

Gena Robinson: This is working now. We’ve worked with the Congregation of Holy Cross to rebuild a school. We’ve been able to leverage what ACE has done in the U.S. and use it in Haiti for teacher training. We’ve been able to use our relationship with Catholic Relief Services to improve education across the country. We’ve got Read to Learn, which is going to teach thousands of kids, give them better literacy skills, and give their teachers better skills.

T.J. D’Agostino: We’ve been blessed to add some deeply committed and talented colleagues to the ACE Haiti team. Kate is doing amazing work leading a large-scale literacy project that we think could be a game-changer and a focus for our future work. Gena is leading an effort to design a new health clinic at Basile Moreau. Along with our partners at CRS and in the Haitian Church, we are now leading the largest and most impactful projects in Haitian education focused on improving educational quality.

Fr. Michel Eugene, CSC: We are trying to make clear that improved education is a necessary path to changing Haiti.

Fr. Tim Scully: It’s just been a beautiful project to watch unfold.

Gena Robinson: Haiti gets better. It’s why you keep working there. It’s not going to be overnight. It’s going to be a lot of work, and it’s going to be piecemeal.

Kate Schuenke-Lucien: People take roads for granted so much, but roads are so important. If you look at Haiti right now, it’s not perfect, but the roads are so much better. For me, that’s almost a symbol. There are potholes, they need to be repaired in some places, but they’re passable. To me, that’s a symbol of where we are. It’s not perfect, but I really believe significant gains have been made.

T.J. D’Agostino: Fr. Scully once encouraged us to have a fifty-year view. And this long-term commitment separates us from many others working in Haiti. Five years in, I think we and our partners and the country as a whole have made some significant progress. But every child in Haiti deserves access to a quality education in accordance with his or her dignity. This is the goal, and we’re still a long way to achieving this.

Gena Robinson: While Haiti has suffered through centuries of natural, man-made, political, and economic disasters, a deep-rooted faith that things will get better keeps us motivated. Haiti gets better, in large part because of the students that we are working with and the educational system that we are working to strengthen, and because of the hope for a better life that motivates all of us.

Kate Schuenke-Lucien: Everyone with experience in Haiti can now say, “Yes, significant and lasting changes have been accomplished, though there is still much to be done.”

Warm, sunny days.

Big, bright blue skies with puffs of white clouds floating in the distance.

This is summer at the University of Notre Dame, a time far removed from the surroundings on this brisk, winter day, but a time full of new life, hope, and of course, opportunities to connect with friends, family, alumni, and fellow teachers as we support our nation’s Catholic schools.

We want you to be a part of this experience. Join us this summer at one of the conferences, seminars, and opportunities listed below. Please check back as the list grows through the spring.

The English as a New Language (ENL) program is an 18-credit-hour program that prepares Catholic school teachers and principals to be teacher-leaders for linguistically and culturally diverse children. The ENL program begins with a two-week summer session from July 9th-24th at Notre Dame and continues throughout the year with online courses. The curriculum is tailored specifically to the reality of Catholic schools, and credit can lead to ENL/ESL/ELL certification in most states. Start your application today.

The Notre Dame Center for STEM Education is also excited to announce a new initiative to help and support early career, middle school teachers of STEM disciplines—the Trustey Family STEM Teaching Fellows. Recruiting for this three-summer, two-academic-year, fully funded fellowship is now underway! Learn more about the STEM Teaching Fellows and download an application.

The annual Play Like a Champion Sports Leadership Conference offers professional development for coaches, athletic administrators, sport parents, and officials at the youth, high school, and collegiate levels, with a special emphasis on developing the whole person through sports. This year’s conference will be held from June 26th-27th. Register today.

The Vámonos workshop brings together recruiters, admissions directors, and other individuals from around the country who are engaged in the mission of promoting the unique value of Catholic schools to Latino communities. The conference will be held at Notre Dame from June 14th-17th. Register here.

The Latino Enrollment Institute, an initiative built around a four-day summer workshop at Notre Dame, helps Catholic school principals and other leaders make a major impact on Latino enrollment and community engagement. The conference will be held at Notre Dame from June 21st-24th.

Developed at the request of (arch)bishops around the country, the School Pastors Institute is designed to respond to the unique and increasingly complex challenges and opportunities related to serving as a pastor of a parish school. This four-day conference will be held from July 7th-10th. Learn more about the School Pastors Institute.

The Center for STEM Education is looking for ACE graduates who are teaching science or math interested in teaching at two-week STEM summer camps for middle school students. Camps are tentatively planned for twelve cities across the United States. For descriptions of the two camps, check out: http://stemeducation.nd.edu/pd-programs/summer/. Please contact Matt Wilsey () as soon as possible with dates you are available this summer and your preference on teaching science and engineering or ND CORE.

Two summer internships in Haiti will provide the opportunity for ACE graduates to work in Basile Moreau School, a flagship, preK-12 Holy Cross school that was destroyed in the 2010 earthquake and is newly rebuilt. The internship will begin June 28th and end August 7th. Those interested in the experience can contact TJ D’Agostino ().

Updated: March 12, 2015