This is such a good model for education.
The Freep on the Detroit Cristo Rey School:
To graduate from Detroit’s newest Catholic high school, a student will have to succeed not only in the classroom, but in the workplace.
At Cristo Rey High School, students from low-income families will work one day a week in local businesses and organizations to help pay for their schooling.
The school’s alternative learning model seeks to provide its students — about 75 in the inaugural freshman class — with a rigorous college-prep education and polished work resumé by the time they graduate.
“We wanted to make an excellent Catholic high school affordable for low-income families,” says Sister Canice Johnson, a Sister of Mercy who led a grassroots effort to bring the Cristo Rey model to Detroit.
She approached many of the employers, including St. John and St. Mary Mercy hospitals, Detroit Salt Co. and R.L. Polk, that will provide entry-level jobs for the students.
Cristo Rey, housed in southwest Detroit’s old Holy Redeemer High School that closed in 2005, is also Detroit’s only coed Catholic high school. Volunteers have worked to raise $900,000 in grants and donations to open the school.
Cristo Rey has been in session since early August. Teens are learning about proper office etiquette, how to dress for the workplace, how to look someone in the eye and confidently shake hands.
Cristo Rey, which means Christ the King in Spanish, is an education model that has helped disadvantaged kids get ready for college and the workplace in 18 cities since it debuted in Chicago in 1996.
Susan Rowe is Cristo Rey’s principal. When school starts at 7:30 a.m., she’s in the gym to meet with all the students. During the day, she’ll stop a girl in the hall to say her earrings are a little garish, or that a young man needs to iron his collared shirt and make sure he’s wearing a belt — so they will know how to be appropriately dressed for the workplace.
“Who are you?” she asks them during morning assembly. They reply in unison: “Future college students.”
When organizers toured other Cristo Rey schools in the Midwest, they were struck by the number of students who repeatedly said “I love my work.”
Students, because of their jobs, feel more respected and valued by the adults with whom they work. And Rowe says the students’ adult coworkers “are equally as transformed by the kids.”
Yesenia Lopez, 15, of Detroit was dressed smartly for Cristo Rey one day in office-appropriate attire, including a collared shirt and closed-toe shoes.
Cristo Rey, says Yesenia, “is going to give me new job opportunities and new things to study” on her way to a nursing career.
Pamela Kelly Ford is Cristo Rey’s admissions director. She’s a onetime banking executive who, during a career change, began substitute teaching at the old East Catholic High School in Detroit.
“Families come in very humbled, and say they don’t have a lot, but they still want a lot for their children,” she says. “They see Detroit Cristo Rey as hope … and it blows me away.”
Contact PATRICIA MONTEMURRI at 313-223-4538 or pmontemurri@freepress.com.
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