On Sacred Ground: Kyle Pietrantonio on the Importance of a Catholic Ethos

We seek to create a unique communion of joy among students, their families, and our faculty and staff, in the context of a pre-eminent pre-K through 12^th grade Catholic college-preparatory school. We want to prepare our students for a lifetime of happiness by inculcating in them three foundational virtues: faith, prudence, and magnanimity.  

So proclaims the mission statement posted on the website for Holy Spirit Preparatory School in Atlanta, Georgia. Like most ACE Teaching Fellows in their second year of ACE’s M.Ed. Program, Kyle Pietrantonio found himself in deep discernment about what God was calling him to do next. Law school perhaps? Maybe he was being called to pursue public policy? As he studied for the LSAT and completed law school applications, Kyle couldn’t shake what seemed, at that moment in his life, an even deeper desire: to remain in the classroom, where he could continue to hone the art of teaching.

While any number of criteria could have guided Kyle’s nationwide search for schools where he might continue his teaching career, he found himself most animated by schools with an outright commitment to students’ faith formation. For months, he researched the websites of Catholic schools throughout the country, paying closest attention to schools’ published mission statements. It was the mission statement of Holy Spirit Prep, an independent Catholic pre-K – 12^th grade school, that drew Kyle in, and eventually inspired him to apply, interview, and ultimately agree to a faculty position. Kyle had no previous connections to Holy Spirit Prep, or Atlanta, but the alignment between the school’s mission and his own mission as a Catholic educator created for him a kind of communion akin to the one professed in the mission statement outlined above.

Today, Kyle serves as the Head of School, a position he assumed four years ago after having taught both history and Latin, and served as principal of the Junior High and then the Lower School. Committed to sustaining and strengthening the school’s Catholic identity, Kyle, along with his faculty, staff, and student body, have worked to ensure the school’s Catholicity manifests itself in three ways in particular: through sacraments, service, and sincerity. With Mass and confession offered daily on the two main campuses, and with two chaplains and three priests, Holy Spirit Prep abides by a recipe of “grace building upon grace.” One of the unofficial but pervading mantras of the school is “to serve rather than to be served.” The environment of trust that people have worked to create at Holy Spirit Prep lends itself to this spirit of service. As Kyle asserts, who we are to one another and to the world begins with trust. As evidence of this guiding assumption, there are no locks on students’ lockers at Holy Spirit Prep.

For any school leader, the challenge of building a school’s identity comes with the question, “With whom or what do I begin?” Kyle has placed a special emphasis on his faculty in his role as Head of School, asking, “How are the teachers bearing witness to students? How are they aspiring to be saints?” The past four years have brought about the formation of a committee dedicated to the growth, renewal, and spiritual formation of teachers, with one indicator of its success being that, every year, three or four teachers serve as sponsors to the tenth-graders of Holy Spirit Prep receiving the sacrament of Confirmation. Few images are more powerful than that of a teacher standing behind a student entering into the faith as an adult. That tangible commitment to the faith—on the part of students, staff, and faculty—is one that Kyle Pietrantonio has worked tirelessly to sustain, and one that transforms schools into sacramental places.

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