St. Joseph's goals for students are evident throughout the school.
Students know their priorities the moment they enter St. Joseph Catholic School. A sign by the front door reads, “Our Goals: College. Heaven.’’
Inside the West Tampa school’s cafeteria, boys and girls gather for Holy Karaoke, a morning program that encourages them to dance and sing, and focus on the lessons ahead.
Cartoon pumpkins belt out “Blue Moon’’ while bobbing across a giant movie screen. Sister Nivia Arias, in full habit, croons along at the pulpit before prompting her charges to recite daily affirmations.
Sister Nivia Arias oversees St. Joseph Catholic School's Holy Karaoke morning show.
“We are active learners who do our best work every day,’’ little voices say in unison. “We do the right thing at the right time.”
The saying sums up the philosophy of this 116-year-old parochial school once run by Salesian nuns. It may also be prophetic.
Like other Catholic schools across the nation, St. Joseph struggles with limited resources while trying to attract students and teachers. But a new partnership with the Diocese of St. Petersburg and the University of Notre Dame might be the right thing at the right time.
St. Joseph and another local Catholic school, Sacred Heart in Pinellas Park, are among five schools in the nation taking part in the Notre Dame ACE Academies, a pilot program in conjunction with the university's Alliance for Catholic Education that aims to strengthen Catholic schools and the communities they serve.
The idea is to boost enrollment and help schools develop better leadership, curriculum, instruction, financial management and marketing. (more…)
Charter schools took a page from Catholic schools when they arrived in the 1990s and began their expansion – character development, solid discipline, a no-excuses approach to success for low-income kids. But now it's Catholic schools, struggling with declining enrollment (in part because of competition from charters), that should borrow good ideas from charters, the author of a new report says.
Sean Kennedy, a visiting fellow at the Lexington Institute, points to how high-performing charter schools have embraced data and technology to better differentiate teaching, including use of “blended learning” models that have both improved student performance and reduced cost. “They’ve really invested in data,” Kennedy, a product of Catholic schools, said in the redefinED podcast below. “And that’s something that, unfortunately, for various cultural and just simply resource reasons, Catholic schools have shied away from.”
Kennedy says despite the funk they’re in, Catholic schools can more nimbly embrace promising trends than other education sectors and again stand out. They don’t have the bureaucratic or union entanglements of traditional public schools, and they still have the faith and character-building components in their favor.
“I’m very optimistic,” Kennedy said. Catholic school educators “often take huge pay cuts from what they would get in public schools. They often work much longer hours. And they love what they do. So if it can be presented to them in a way that this is going to benefit both their teaching and their students directly, I think teachers and administrators in Catholic education are at a special advantage to grab a hold of this data movement and really run with it.”
Kennedy also said vouchers and tax credit scholarships can be crucial in Catholic school reform efforts, particularly with Hispanic students. A project is now underway in the Tampa Bay area with two Catholic schools that accept tax credit scholarships and the Notre Dame ACE Academies, which aims to revitalize Catholic education. “There’s fewer and fewer kids in inner city areas being served by high quality Catholic schools, as these Catholic school business models kind of collapse in on themselves. And that’s a tragedy,” Kennedy said. “With the growing Hispanic population, there’s even greater need to serve these families.”
