“I’m going to college in 2025”: Mission accomplished!

Fifteen years ago, at the invitation of Bishop Gerald Kicanas, Notre Dame ACE Academies (NDAA) partnered with St. John the Evangelist in Tucson, AZ where these tiny scholars Mia and Elliyas, along with their classmates, set their goals on going to college in 2025! Today, Mia and Elliyas are headed to Grand Canyon University (GCU) and the University of San Francisco (USF). Congratulations to these two, their families, their classmates, and their school communities!

“We are proud of the St. John the Evangelist community's continued commitment to a strong Catholic school culture and academic excellence, putting more students on the path to college and heaven,” said Ryan Clark, director of NDAA. “It's so exciting to see their scholars flourishing!”

A providential journey

In 2001, the Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) first expanded to Tucson by sending a community of Teaching Fellows.  Over the past 24 years, ACE has placed more than 70 teachers in Tucson’s Catholic schools and has prepared 9 Tucson-area educators through the Mary Ann Remick Leadership program.

In 2000, Cindy Parseghian, daughter-in-law of Notre Dame’s famous football coach and now a trustee of Notre Dame, served as the catalyst that drew the Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) to Tucson, when she connected John Staud, executive director of ACE, and Sr. Rosa Maria Ruiz, then diocesan superintendent of schools, with the goal of bringing ACE to the desert southwest. ACE had first placed teachers in Phoenix and was increasingly committed to serving predominantly Latino schools in the southwest and southern California. The stars aligned for what has proved to be a providential expansion, helped by the late Rachel Moreno, Ph.D., a much-beloved faculty member in ACE who had vast networks in her hometown of Tucson.

In addition to hosting nearly 100 ACE-formed educators, in 2010, the Diocese of Tucson became the home of the first Notre Dame ACE Academies, which strives to revitalize Catholic schools and leverage scholarship funding. The turnaround of St John the Evangelist, whose enrollment tripled in the first few years, remains one of the program’s great success stories. Building on that success at St John’s and Santa Cruz, ACE’s Pursuing Achievement through Higher Education (PATH) program was launched in Tucson in 2017 and has worked to put hundreds of students, beginning with 6th graders, on the path to and through college.