Archive for the ‘High School’ Category

McQuaid Jesuit High School in Rochester, N.Y., has selected its interim president, Jesuit Father Edward Salmon, to lead the school on a permanent basis.

Fr. Salmon, the former president of St. Peter’s Prep in Jersey City, N.J., served at McQuaid from 2002 until 2007 as superior of the Jesuit community, faculty and staff chaplain. He also taught Latin at the school and was chairman of the board’s Ignatian Identity Committee.

Salmon was named interim president in April to replace outgoing leader William Hobbs, who stepped down after the school year to become vice president of the Jesuit Secondary Education Association in Washington, D.C.

“McQuaid is blessed to have his wisdom, eloquence and spiritual nature to guide us through the years ahead,” said Jesuit Father James Fischer, former president of McQuaid.

Jesuit Father Chris Devron says he has always been interested in start-ups and has an entrepreneurial personality. So it’s fitting that he’s president of Christ the King Jesuit College Preparatory School, the first all-new Catholic high school on Chicago’s West Side in more than 80 years.

Fr. Devron has come full circle in many ways. In 1995 he was a Jesuit novice in Chicago when he witnessed the beginning of the country’s first Cristo Rey school, Cristo Rey Jesuit High School, while attending the press conference announcing that the Jesuits were starting the school.

He remembers being thrilled that the Society of Jesus would be open to something new. “My exposure to that point had been that we had schools that were long-established, and that we were struggling with diversification and becoming less and less affordable to lower-income families. To see there was this new model that would help kids and families [afford Jesuit education], that was really exciting to me,” he says.

Christ the King, which follows the Cristo Rey work-study model, opened at a temporary site with 120 students in 2008, and its brand new building opened in January 2010. An architecture critic at the Chicago Tribune said the new building’s “business-like image and its unrepentant sense of newness — a shock amid the tattered brick buildings around it — are both there by design, sending a message that the building marks a fresh start.”

Despite being in a low-income neighborhood, families can afford the private education Christ the King offers because of its work-study model in which students work five days a month at a corporation, helping them pay for their tuition. A few students share a full-time job at businesses such as U.S. Bank, Loyola Medical Center and even the Chicago Blackhawks.

Education had been Fr. Devron’s passion even before joining the Society, and it led him to his vocation. After attending Notre Dame as an undergrad, he taught in the Bronx. He thought he would teach for a year and then go to law school, but teaching put him in touch with his deeper desires.

“I began to wonder and pray and ask myself what it would be like if I were to continue teaching, but to do so as a priest ultimately,” he says. Read the rest of this entry »

On August 29, 2005, New Orleans experienced one of the worse natural disasters in U.S. history. While the city escaped a direct hit from Hurricane Katrina, the rising waters breached the levees that surround the city, leaving 80 percent of New Orleans under water. Five years later, New Orleans is a city rebuilding.

There has been a strong Jesuit presence in New Orleans from the days of the city’s founding over 300 years ago. The Jesuits have been in New Orleans in times of crisis like typhoid and yellow fever outbreaks at the turn of the 19th century and when the city flooded previously in the 1920s. Jesuit works like Good Shepherd Nativity School, which provides educational opportunities to disadvantaged children in the city, and Café Reconcile, a youth training program that provides on the job training in its restaurant, continue to help the city look toward a vibrant future. Schools like Loyola University and Jesuit High School continue to provide top notch education opportunities, while the Harry Thompson Center, a day shelter for the city’s homeless, reach out to the city’s most vulnerable. Today, the Jesuits continue to serve the spiritual needs of people of New Orleans and will continue be there for the city as it rebuilds and recovers.

National Jesuit News highlights the outreach and the dedication of the New Orleans Jesuits in the video piece below and provides a comprehensive overview of the Jesuit works in New Orleans five years after Katrina in the article following the video below.

Read the rest of this entry »

Jesuit Father TJ Martinez is well-loved, energetic and totally hip. Everything from his sleek pointed-toe cowboy boots, eye-catching belt buckle and occasional faux-hawk to his outgoing demeanor says “approachable.” He loves wandering the halls and joking with his students; a self-professed cheerleader, he loves to be right in the middle of everything – both the good and the bad. The zero-tolerance gang and cheating policies can put him in a difficult position, but at the end of the day, Fr. Martinez says he is the “luckiest Jesuit priest in the country.” You can read more about Fr. Martinez, president of Cristo Rey Jesuit College Preparatory in Houston, and the success of the newly opened school for children from economically challenged families in 002Houston magazine.

With gentrification morphing the once crime-ridden and drug-infested streets of the Lower East Side of Manhattan into storefronts filled with swanky merchandise and hip restaurants, the Nativity Mission Center, a Jesuit middle school that for nearly 40 years has been educating promising, but poor, boys in the neighborhood is starting to feel out of place. Knowing that the school must be located where the need is greatest, Jesuit Father Jack Podsiadlo is  following in the tradition of intrepid Jesuit missionaries and has embarked on an urban expedition: finding a needy neighborhood where he can relocate his school by 2012.

Fr. Podsiadlo’s quest to find the right location for his school and highlights of the work of the Nativity Mission Center are profiled in this piece in the New York Times. You can also view a slideshow of photos of the school and the Lower East Side neighborhood where it is currently located.