Door Opens For Catholic School Reinvention

In December, Schools Building Communities reported that two Catholic elementary schools — St. Anthony Catholic School and St. Andrew & St. Rita Catholic Academy — had proposed to the Indianapolis Mayor’s Office that they would be willing to strip themselves of their names and their Catholic identities to become charter schools.

Last evening, at a meeting of the Indianapolis Charter Schools Board, those yet-to-be-renamed schools were granted the request.

This unusual move, the first of its kind in the state of Indiana, had strong community support as the schools are seen as important neighborhood anchors. Representatives of ADI Charter Schools, Inc., which will oversee the conversions, spoke to the challenges ahead as well as the promise for reaching more students than it had in recent years. Support for the initiative was so great it caused one founding board member to mention that it was the largest crowd ever for such a meeting.

But while the conversion is indeed new for Indiana, SBC first addressed the topic back in October after two long-standing Philadelphia Catholic high schools were scheduled to close. In that story, Rev. Timothy Scully, the founder of the University of Notre Dame’s Alliance for Catholic Education, was quoted from a Time Magazine story. He said that Catholic schools had to re-invent themselves, as St. Andrew and St. Rita did when they merged seven years ago, or they would eventually disappear from America’s inner cities.

“The model upon which we were founded was so different,” he added. “Both from a cost and supply side.”

The charter board elected unanimously to support the Indianapolis conversion, allowing for a reinvestment in communities that would have been burdened by the loss of the schools.

The board also took time before the meeting to present a certificate of appreciation from Mayor Greg Ballard to Jose Rosario for his nine years of service as a founding member of the charter board. Rosario, a professor in the School of Education at IUPUI, has been a friend to Schools Building Communities and we were pleased to snap a quick photo of former Indiana Lt. Gov. John Mutz, the chair of the Mayor’s board, presenting the award.