Making sure schools are ‘Catholic,’ accessible

This week, Catholic New World staff writer Michelle Martin talks with Nicholas Wolsonovich.

	The Interview, a regular feature of The Catholic New World, is an in-depth conversation with a person whose words, actions or ideas affect today’s Catholic. It may be affirming of faith or confrontational. But it will always be stimulating.

Roughly 130,000 students are heading back to Catholic schools for the new academic year, and they are joined by new Superintendent Nicholas Wolsonovich. Wolsonovich, 57, took the helm of the archdiocesan schools office this summer, and he is working on getting to know the archdiocese and its 304 elementary schools and high schools, while bringing the benefit of his 28 years of Catholic school administration in Youngstown, Ohio.



The Catholic New World: What are your goals for this year?

Nicholas Wolsonovich: The goals I have coming in are to learn the situation, to learn the schools, to learn the context that our schools are operating in. There’s a lot of people to learn about, there’s a lot of situations to learn about. In this job you’re always learning, but the learning curve has to be significant right here at the very beginning. I’m meeting with people to find out about what they do, how they do it and what needs to be done. Eventually, you can put that in an overall plan.

However, at the same time I say that, I would say that I’ve been doing this since Dec. 15 when I had my first interview. At that time, I began to study the archdiocese in terms of what I think the issues are, and to see whether or not I wanted to take the job. The same themes keep coming back. The theme is planning so that we can keep as many of our schools viable so that they can serve as many kids as possible. We want to make sure that there are Catholic schools available to any child in the archdiocese who wants to attend a Catholic school, high school and elementary. That’s going to be a major part of what I do.

The other major thrust is the whole issue of working with everybody and anybody to procure the kind of financial resources to allow the planning to happen, to make that viable.



TCNW: As of next week, I will be a Catholic school parent for the first time. As a parent, what should I expect from her Catholic school?

Wolsonovich: That’s a question parents ask all the time, and my response to that is just exactly what you said, that it should be a Catholic school. I don’t think we should take that lightly. I don’t think if we have a cross in the school and we say it’s Catholic that it’s Catholic. I think we have to work at it being Catholic.

I use the phrase “thoroughly Catholic.” By that, I mean that the staff, the principal and the teachers, are committed to being ministers of the Word to young people in everything that happens in a Catholic school. That means not just teaching religion in religion class, but teaching religion in science and in history and language arts. It means making sure that your administrative procedures and your classroom procedures reflect justice. It talks about how you work with parents, it talks about the art that’s in the school, it talks about how professionals talk to each other about kids. It’s about the worship that goes on in the school, which would be liturgy and paraliturgy, and also prayer in the classroom.

That’s the only reason we have to exist, to teach as Jesus did. If we’re not that, then we shouldn’t call ourselves Catholic. At the same time, I want to say I think we do a good job with that. We’re good, but we can be better.

Along with that philosophy goes the whole idea of what does that mean for history, social studies, language arts? It means academic excellence in all those different arenas. I think that explains why we strive for academic excellence in everything, in all our extracurricular activities. I would expect a parent to say, if it’s Catholic, then it’s striving for excellence.



TCNW: Given the St. Sabina situation, what place does athletics have in Catholic education?

Wolsonovich: That’s the beautiful part about a Catholic school education. It addresses the whole child: not only the mind, with academics, but also the spiritual side, and along with that goes the physical side. Athletics is part of that whole formula. But it’s also very important that we conduct our athletic programs in a very Catholic manner. That has implications, in terms of who do you schedule, and how do you run practices, and do you play all the kids, and is winning the only thing, and all those things that come into question. You really need coaches who are committed to kids in a Catholic manner to be in charge of those programs, so that’s a real challenge.



TCNW: This archdiocese includes areas where parents are lining up to send their kids to Catholic schools, even at full-freight tuition, and areas where parents can barely afford even subsidized tuition. How do you try to even things out?

Wolsonovich: How you even it out is making sure that there is money available for scholarship programs so that all kids are able to afford and attend a Catholic school who want it. We do not want to become schools for the elite and the wealthy. In terms of “catholic,” catholic means all, universal, so we want to serve all the children. That’s a real challenge, because as tuitions increase, we really have to come up with an awful lot of money for scholarship programs. To a great extent, Big Shoulders does that. But there’s even more need than what Big Shoulders can provide, so we’re always looking for additional revenue sources. …

Are we doing our best? I think that’s a question the parishes have to keep asking themselves, especially when you look at the giving patterns of Catholics versus the giving patterns of other religious groups. I think we should just hold up what’s happening in the Wichita Diocese, where there is no tuition at all. It’s all stewardship. And people give a lot more money in that area than they do in most places across the country. But they are able because of that to not charge for any parish ministries—not the Catholic school, the parish school—and if the kid wants to go to Catholic high school, they’ll pay for that, too. That only works when the people in the parish say this needs to be supported by the whole parish, not just those who are users. There’s two ways to go: users pay, or everybody pays. Where we need to be is somewhere in the middle.



TCNW: In June, the Catholic schools office released a study showing that the longer kids were in archdiocesan Catholic schools, the better they did on standardized tests. What does that tell you?

Wolsonovich: What Father (Andrew) Greeley (of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago) had been saying for years was that the longer kids stay in (Catholic) school, the more active Catholics they become. There is substantial correlation between attending Catholic schools for 10 years or more and being a hopeful person. The longer a kid stays in a Catholic school, he becomes a more faith-filled, active adult Catholic. From the point of view of faith, that’s true. Now we look at academics, and we see it’s also true there. When you look at whether or not the investment we make, as parents and church, is achieving its goals, we can say absolutely, resoundingly yes, from the point of view of religious education and from the point of view of academics. This is research we don’t use often enough when we talk to parents. These Catholics also give more money, because they see the tremendous commitment of the church.

Sometimes people don’t want us to say these things, because they don’t want to upset those who didn’t go to Catholic schools, but that’s part of the research and that’s part of the reality. We can say to parents, there’s a lot of good reasons your kids should go to Catholic schools, and there’s hard evidence.



TCNW: Then why is it so difficult to persuade Catholic elementary school students to attend Catholic high schools?

Wolsonovich: One of the things that’s very disconcerting to me is when I would go around and talk to eighth-grade students, and I would ask them where they were going to go to school next year, they would tell me X, Y or Z. But the troublesome thing was when I would ask them who made that decision, and they said they did. I really think parents should not allow their eighth-graders to make that decision. The value, the benefit of going to a Catholic high school—and elementary school—the benefits are so fantastic that I don’t think a parent should say to a kid, you go wherever you want to. I think parents are reneging on their parental responsibility. My God, will that get a headline! Parents who send their kids to Catholic schools are absolutely dying to hear someone say those things, because they are making the commitment for reasons that we’re talking about here.

I am not afraid at all to state very strongly that there are reasons parents should send their kids to Catholic school, and they’re documented with research, they’re documented with hard facts. And I also feel very strongly that parents should make that decision, not the kids. I bet 50 to 60 percent of the parents allow their kids to make that decision—that’s my experience, maybe it’s different here. It’s almost like parents say, I’ve got so much money, I’m going to spend it either on high school or elementary school.