Alliance for Catholic Education
Happy belated St. Patrick's Day!
I had an amazing opportunity to spend last week working with about 20 teachers and school leaders in Dublin from four Catholic schools serving low-income communities. We visited the schools, met with teachers, and spent hours talking through root beliefs and shared purposes. In the end, we wound up telling lots of stories. As I've mentioned before, I think strong school leaders need to be excellent storytellers, because it is through our stories that we most effectively communicate the beliefs and values that we seek to transmit when we educate the mind and the heart. And the Irish are uncommonly good storytellers.
One story I heard struck me in particular. It was kind of an origin story. Le Cheile Secondary School is the first new Catholic high school in Ireland in over 30 years. Its principal, Aine Moran, told us that the governing body of the school took the unusual step of deciding to not grant preferential enrollment privileges to students based on religious identification. Catholic schools are publicly funded in Ireland, and the relationship between the government and the Church and the schools gets incredibly complicated, but schools are permitted to discriminate when enrolling students based on religion. In other words, if a school is nearly full, the school can give Catholic kids preferential admissions treatment.
Le Cheile's leaders, however, decided not to do this. The school, which is governed by a trust comprised of 19 different religious communities, serves the lowest income communities of outer Dublin, which includes both 2nd and 3rd generation unemployed, nominally Catholic, white Irish families living in government housing projects alongside newly arrived immigrant families from around the world, including Muslims, Hindus, and other non-Catholics, non-whites, and non-Irish. I asked Aine why they chose not to focus on the Catholic population of the community, and she replied, "Because we believe 'catholic' means 'universal' too - and as soon as we start becoming exclusive, and as soon as we start keeping people out instead of welcoming them in, then we will just spend all of our time explaining ourselves. And I believe that once we start having to explain, we lose. Besides, I don't think Christ went around excluding people now did he?"
Aine and her leadership team are participating in our school culture workshops because they are grappling with a difficult question: in a newly pluralistic Ireland, what does it mean for us to be a Catholic school? The classrooms in Aine's school had as many girls in head scarves as it had freckle-faced redheaded Irish kids. So it was beautiful to hear her commitment to a belief rooted in the Gospel, modeled on Christ's example of exclusion, of reaching out to the marginalized, and of building bridges between communities.
So on this St Patrick's Day week, I want to thank all of you for the many ways that you are carrying forward the legacy of the 200+ years of service of these heroic women to Catholic schools!
Go Irish!
Christian