St. Leander School Partners with Catholic School Advantage and ENL Program to Better Serve Latino Students

When Lynne Mullen, Principal of St. Leander School in the Diocese of Oakland, received the invitation to attend the Latino Enrollment Institute (LEI) in 2012, she saw it as the perfect opportunity to respond to her parish community's changing demographics. Having observed the growing number of Latino families at the Spanish Masses and in the parish religious education programs, she was eager to reach out to this growing population and make Catholic education a more visible and viable option for Latino families in the community.

The LEI provided just the tools she needed to begin this important outreach. After implementing a number of strategies learned at the LEI, including meeting with prospective families after the Spanish Masses, promoting the school from the pulpit, personally walking families through the enrollment process and its accompanying paperwork, and making all scholarship applications and information available in Spanish, Mullen and her staff were able to increase the Latino enrollment at St. Leander by 43 percent the following year.

Mullen returned to Notre Dame the summer after attending the LEI to further develop St. Leander's capacity to serve the growing number of Latino families at the school, particularly those whose primary language is not English. She participated in the English as a New Language Program (ENL), where she learned how to support the academic, linguistic, and cultural needs of the Latino students and families in her school. "I have learned strategic ways to help our parents connect more meaningfully to our school and support their children's education," Mullen said. "The information I learned in my classes has helped our faculty more effectively design curriculum to assess and instruct our language learners. Our partnership with the University of Notre Dame has truly been an integral part of our Latino Enrollment Plan."