Our fall 1998 issue ran a story about Chicago's Cristo Rey Jesuit High School, where students study four days a week and work one day at an entry-level position at the offices of corporate sponsors, their salaries going toward tuition. This work-study combination makes quality high school education affordable. The original article is on the web at www.companymagazine.org /v161/education.html .

Student Billy Holliday speaks to the audience gathered on the day the Christian Brothers (including Br. Michael Sanderl, behind Billy) opened De La Salle North High School in Portland, Oregon, last fall. This new school is based on the Cristo Rey model: four days of class and one day of work that helps make tuition affordable.

In the late summer of 1997 I was in Chicago, paying a visit to Fr. John Foley, SJ, president of Cristo Rey Jesuit High School. John, who had been my boss when I was in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in Peru in the 1980s, walked with me along Lake Michigan. He asked how life was for me in Boston. I told him that professionally it was going well. I had left the practice of law and was enjoying work for an insurance company, but, as I explained to him, I was hoping to work in the nonprofit world.

A few minutes later we were headed to Cristo Rey, which serves a predominantly Latino community on the city's southwest side. I noticed dozens of kids on the streets, laughing and chatting in the summer sun.

"Those are our kids," John explained. "They're the ones we're here to serve."

Located in a former grammar school, Cristo Rey was beginning its second year. It employed an innovative program in which students worked one day a week in entry-level clerical jobs to help pay tuition.

John and I chatted in his office in a former convent. "This is the most exciting thing I've ever done," he declared. This was a huge statement from a man who spent 34 years in Peru, one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere. "We're breaking the barrier between private education and needy sectors of our society."

John explained that the Jesuits planned to build a new building right where we were sitting and that Cristo Rey would grow to 500 students within a few years. Phase two of the project, he explained, was to have several of these schools around the country.

He wasn't sure how much money was needed to build the new building, nor did he know when construction would begin. But he did know that he needed a development director. He asked me to think about taking the job.

I thought he was crazy. I had no idea how to run a capital campaign, and I had trouble conceiving of a new classroom building replacing the old convent where we were sitting. "It's a sin to doubt," John said. "We can do this."

Leaving a place where I had lived for nearly ten years wasn't easy, but I felt drawn to this mission of bringing Catholic college-prep education to young people who otherwise could not afford it. So, in January 1998 I signed on at Cristo Rey, taking on the responsibility of managing its $14 million capital campaign. The school's administrative team was by far the most talented and driven group of people I had ever worked with. Principal Sr. Judy Murphy, OSB, former president and principal of an all-girls school on Chicago's northwest side, recruited top faculty talent. Preston Kendall, with an MBA from Northwestern, had left a lucrative career to serve as the school's executive vice president, overseeing the work-study program, finances, and the construction of our new building. John was our spiritual and visionary leader.

By the time I arrived, the team had been together for two intense and challenging years. Classes had begun in a gym because of building renovations to the old grammar school. Many faculty were having their first experience with inner-city students and learning to shelve traditional teaching methods for a more hands-on approach. Preston and his team were making the work-study program fit the needs of the corporate community.

When budget projections showed that the school would not break even as planned, the board called upon the volunteer services of consulting giant McKinsey & Co., which found holes in our organizational structure and suggested changes that have become the norm for future schools adopting the model.

Thanks to John's charm and energy and a generous board of directors, fundraising went extraordinarily well, and we exceeded our goals. The new building opened in January 2000; a few months later the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Francis Cardinal George, and major political figures in Chicago took part in a ceremony on the site of the former convent that had been replaced, just as John had predicted, with a state-of-the-art building with 23 classrooms.

More than 85 percent of our graduates were going to college, a good-news statistic in a neighborhood where the high school graduation rate was under 50 percent. Thanks to Preston's creative leadership, the work-study program was a phenomenal success. More than 90 percent of our corporate sponsors renewed contracts each year, and the students' exposure to the business world and academic accomplishments increased their self-esteem and sense of what their lives could be.

Michael Davis, student at Los Angeles's Verbum Dei High School, stops for a second with lawyer Thomas Johnson at the reception area of Girardi & Keese, on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. The law firm employs Michael and other "Verb" students one day a week; such corporate involvement is an essential component of the Cristo Rey model.

The Word Spreads

Cristo Rey's success captured the imagination of Catholic educators around the country who were also interested in reaching economically disadvantaged students. We started getting inquiries from Oregon, Texas, and New York who wanted to replicate our success.

And right at the time this interest in the Cristo Rey model was intensifying, B.J. Cassin, a '55 graduate of Holy Cross and a California venture capitalist, someone I had met when I was raising money for Jesuit works in Peru, paid us a visit.

B.J. toured the school and met our staff. Then he asked John how he could help. I was all ears, hoping that John would ask him for money for the gym, cafeteria, and library addition we were planning.

John set his sights higher. "B.J., we could really use your help replicating this model around the country," he said. "We can't keep up with the demand Catholic educators have for learning about this model."

B. J. had chaired the board of trustees of St. Mary's College in Moraga, California. He was concerned about the low number of minority students in college and knew that they needed better preparation in order to make it to and through college.

He called the next day. He said he was establishing a foundation, which he would eventually seed with $22 million, to help expand the Cristo Rey concept.

B.J.'s visit happened to coincide with my plans to leave Cristo Rey. I was getting married, and my wife and I had decided to move back to the Boston area, nearer our families. B.J. made the move easier by offering me the position of executive director of the new Cassin Educational Initiative Foundation.

Still, it was not easy to leave Cristo Rey. John, Preston, Judy, and I had formed a tight bond. I knew I would miss being in a building every day with 450 excited and energizing young people. But I knew I could not miss the opportunity to help replicate Cristo Rey.

We had come a long way from that talk in John's makeshift office. The school was thriving, and John's vision for phase two was taking shape.

A Texas inaugural event: student Jonathan Gutierrez and 45 fellow classmates and faculty had made a circle around Juan Diego High School in Austin, a co-ed diocesan school inspired by Cristo Rey, during the opening ceremony last August 25. On cue they all snipped away at a commemorative ribbon surrounding the building, and everyone kept a souvenir.

The Next Step

My job with the foundation is to help extend the Cristo Rey model to other religious groups. The first to replicate Cristo Rey was the Christian Brothers, who opened a school in Portland, Oregon, in the fall of 2001. Soon, we were working with the Diocese of Austin, the Missouri, California, Detroit, and New York provinces of the Society of Jesus, the New England Province of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, the Sisters of the Humility of Mary, Christian Brothers on the East Coast, the Dominican Sisters, and many others wanting to reproduce this new model.

These congregations were excited about this new way of providing education to the urban poor, and they were hoping that a new project would energize their membership as had been the case for the Jesuits in Chicago.

My work changed with this new assignment. Instead of begging for funds, the focus of my job as Cristo Rey's development director, I was now educating groups on how the Cristo Rey program works, making grants for feasibility studies and start-up expenses, providing guidance to those conducting feasibility studies, and consulting with steering committees as they become the boards that govern the new schools.

Jeff Thielman, former development director for Cristo Rey, is now executive director of a foundation that helps other religious groups turn their desires for new Cristo Rey schools into brick-and-mortar reality. By the fall of 2002, new Cristo Rey model schools had opened in Portland, Los Angeles, and Austin. Next fall, the Jesuits' Missouri Province will open Arrupe Jesuit High in Denver, and schools are planned to open in 2004 in Boston; Cleveland; Lawrence, Massachusetts; New Bern, North Carolina; New Brunswick, New Jersey; Tucson; and Waukegan, Illinois. We're projecting sixteen Cristo Rey schools in low-income communities within the next five years that will be educating 6,500 students.

We are still at the beginning of this national movement. Each school will go through growing pains just as Cristo Rey did. Thankfully, these schools will have a model to follow as they work to bring private Catholic education to young people in urban America.