New high school to open

Archdiocese to turn Our Lady of Sorrows elementary into work-study program

Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2006

Click here to enlarge this photo Susan Whitney-Wilkerson⁄The Gazette Currently an elementary school, Our Lady of Sorrows School on Larch Avenue in Takoma Park will close at the end of the school year to make way for a Cristo Rey Network school, which incorporates a work-study program to help the families of high school students pay tuition.

Planning is under way for a 500-seat co-ed school where each student will earn about 80 percent of the annual tuition through a work-study program with local businesses, Superintendent Patricia Weitzel-O’Neill said.

The school will take over the campus of Our Lady of Sorrows School on Larch Avenue, which will close at the end of the current school year.

The archdiocese will base the high school on the national Cristo Rey Network, an approach to parochial education that Weitzel-O’Neill said marries the classroom with the business world.

‘‘This model affords an opportunity for low-income families to experience a college-prep Catholic high school education, and at the same time develop the skills that are so necessary for success, not only in college, but in the workplace and beyond,” she said.

The school will open fall 2007 with a freshman class of about 120 and 10 faculty members, she said. And while news that the Cristo Rey Network selected the archdiocese for a school is exciting, Weitzel-O’Neill said work also is under way to move Our Lady of Sorrows’ 137 students to other Catholic elementary schools.

Archdiocese spokeswoman Susan Gibbs said the existing school’s 11 full-time faculty and three part-time faculty will have opportunities to apply for other positions within the archdiocesan system.

Our Lady of Sorrows school, supported by the adjacent parish and church (which will remain open), has struggled in recent years, Weitzel-O’Neill said, and the archdiocese reached a point where it needed to make a difficult decision. The archdiocese could continue heavily subsidizing the school’s day-to-day operations ‘‘or move the children to three schools that are in a three-mile radius that can provide the students with more of the extras,” Weitzel-O’Neill said.

‘‘I believe the ability to place this high school in Takoma Park on New Hampshire Avenue opens the door to our low-income families in the archdiocese because it’s so easily accessed by mass transit,” she added.

Students ‘integrated’ with corporate world

The Archdiocese of Washington will operate the new high school in partnership with the Cristo Rey Network and the Salesians of Don Bosco, a Catholic religious order. Salesian Father Steve Shafran, former head of a parochial high school in New Jersey, arrived in Washington last week to guide the establishment of the Takoma Park school.

‘‘We want the students to be integrated with both the corporate world and the school,” he said of Cristo Rey’s work-study program, which he compared to a paid internship. ‘‘The workplace becomes a place for education, breaking down walls of the school, and education becomes broader than the confines of the school.”

The school will have an internship director and program coordinators. The coordinators will visit students at their work sites and facilitate contact between the job supervisors and classroom teachers. ‘‘We want the teachers to be able to assist a better transition to the workday and vice versa; the work will motivate the students at school,” he said.

When Cristo Rey’s flagship high school in Chicago started its work-study program 10 years ago, it placed students in stock exchanges, law offices and hospitals, said Shafran, who hopes for as many diverse choices in the Takoma Park area, especially with a redeveloped Silver Spring nearby.

Shafran said he expects the student body at the new high school will be similar demographically to the surrounding community, with a mix of Latino, African, black, white and Haitian students. ‘‘The desire to be multicultural is very strong.”

There also is strong support for the high school throughout the entire archdiocese, Gibbs said. When Cristo Rey Network representatives visited last year, they attended a meeting that included Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and three of his bishops — the first time so many senior leaders of a diocese attended an evaluation meeting, she said. ‘‘If there was any question about commitment, it was all answered there.”

Transitioning elementary students

While Shafran and others within the archdiocese commence planning for the Cristo Rey (‘‘Christ the King” in Latin) school, others are working with parents and students at Our Lady of Sorrows. Weitzel-O’Neill said the elementary students would move to schools at St. Camillus farther up New Hampshire Avenue, St. Michael the Archangel in downtown Silver Spring and St. Mark in Adelphi.

‘‘They are all more than able to host and take these students next fall,” she said, adding that Our Lady of Sorrows Principal Gail Ruffin supports the decision. ‘‘This is a sad time for the school, and it’s a bit of a grieving time for them, but they want these children to have the best possible education.”

Ruffin could not be reached before The Gazette’s Tuesday deadline, but said in an archdiocesan statement that the high school’s opening is a positive situation. ‘‘We have served the community well and the community has served us well.”

Our Lady of Sorrows School opened in 1950 with 410 children enrolled in kindergarten through fourth grade, according to a history on the parish’s Web site. School enrollment fell to 318 by 1969, and in the early part of this decade, barely 200 children attended the school. Since 2001, the school has lost 44 percent of its students while tuition has risen 46 percent.

Bill Murray, the school’s development director during the 2002-2003 school year, said Our Lady of Sorrows faced significant challenges, with transient families who did not have a connection with the adjoining parish. Few parents were involved, and given the school’s troubles, he said he understands why the archdiocese would choose the site for the new high school.

‘‘When I was there, unfortunately, parental involvement was weak,” he said. ‘‘The families were struggling with other issues. Being able to make the sacrifice to send their kids to the school was a very big one.”

Weitzel-O’Neill acknowledged the difficult situation at Our Lady of Sorrows: ‘‘We had to make some hard choices, but I think in the end, we’re doing what’s best for the children first and foremost, and what will be best for all of the children in the area in 2007.”

A new high school

The Cristo Rey school in Takoma Park will be the first high school the Archdiocese of Washington has opened in more than 55 years. The archdiocese operates 30 elementary schools and six high schools in Montgomery County.

Area Catholic high school tuitions range from about $7,600 at Elizabeth Seton in Bladensburg to more than $19,600 for non-boarding students at Georgetown Preparatory in North Bethesda.

The archdiocese estimates that a Cristo Rey parent will pay annual tuition between $2,500 and $3,000, or about $250 per month, with the student earning the rest through work-study.