Mission Statements for Catholic Schools—Five Suggestions

Mission statements for schools are usually written by a committee.  To make sure everyone’s perspective is included in the final result, they tend to say too much, and often become wordy, ineffective and unmemorable.

My career in Catholic education began in 1985, and as a young teacher, I was placed on the “mission committee” in preparation for an accreditation visit. I don’t remember the exact wording of what we came up with, but it was similar to many other mission statements at the time, reflecting the “whole child” emphasis, with its familiar mantra of areas we wanted to develop in our students: spiritual, physical, emotional, academic, artistic, and the like. While there’s no doubt a Catholic school should be aimed at more than a student’s intellectual development, these kind of “lists” are now so common in mission statements that they lack any emotive power. In short, they are boring. 

But hey, we completed our duty and checked the box. How important is a mission statement, anyway? Just words, right? We can now file it away until the next accreditation visit ten years in the future, and get on to the more important work of running a school.

Thirty two years and principal of three Catholic high schools since, I have completely changed  my view. Simple, evocative mission statements are essential building blocks  to establish the right culture in our school. And it's the school’s culture, more than any new academic program, more than any new teacher training, new pedagogy, or new techniques, which determines school effectiveness. As one pundit put it, “School culture eats strategies for breakfast.” To build that culture, the first step is define the school’s “why” as succinctly and powerfully as possible.

I have five suggestions on how we can do this.

1) I believe mission statements should be aspirational: “Scholars” and not “Students,” “Disciples” and not merely “Christians” or “Catholics.” Students are children of God, capable of greatness because of the transforming power of God’s grace within them. We want students to set bold goals, to stretch and to challenge themselves, to seek “more.” 

2) They should tell our “why” not our “how.” We exist to “form disciples.” Not “We seek to form partnerships with parents so as to help form disciples.” Following the insights of Simon Sinek, our emotional response to “why” is much more powerful than our reaction to "how."  For sure, the idea of parents as partners is an important operational principle, but it can be more effectively communicated in a vision statement or set of principles of operation.

3) They should be repeatable, short phrases, rather than long winded sets of words that no one can remember. With mission statements, less is more—if it can’t be remembered, it’s unlikely to have much effect on anything or anyone. I recommend using three key words or three short phrases (the “magic number”) as the essence of the mission statement. ( cf. “Power of Three”, "Power of 3 for Effective Communication", "Using the Power of Three to Create Engaging Content")

Here are five examples of mission statements that I believe make effective use of the power of three:

• "We share we share in the responsibility to prepare students for college and beyond,  while helping them to grow to become persons of faith, virtue, and wisdom." (Montgomery Catholic Preparatory School, Montgomery)

• "Montgomery Bell Academy offers young men an exemplary college preparatory experience, helping them become gentlemen, scholars, and athletes.” (Montgomery Bell Academy, Nashville)

• “Catholic. Marianist. Forming our Students into Remarkable Men.” (Archbishop Moeller, Cincinnati)

• “St. Michael aspires for its students to become scholars, leaders and disciples of Jesus Christ” (St. Michael, Fairhope, the school of which I'm principal)

• Heart of Mary Catholic School seeks to form students who are faithful to Jesus Christ, committed to their studies, and proud of themselves and their school." The "tagline" for the school is thus "Faithful. Committed.Proud!" (Heart of Mary Catholic elementary, Mobile, AL). 

4)We should be as specific as possible. The problem with saying "We are focused on "spiritual growth," for example, is that "spiritual" is so abstract it has very little emotive power.  Spiritual growth toward what?  Couldn't any religious school from any religious tradition--Muslim, Jewish, Christian or Hindu--say they are interested in the spiritual growth of their students? Would the school be happy if each student developed his or her own private , distinct religious views, sincerely held?  Or does the school hope to form students in the gospel of Jesus Christ?

5) These words should repeated over and over. They should be a theme of every PTO talk to parents. The principal should be very observant of ways they are being lived out in the hallways, and tell stories about what he or she has observed. They should be on school stationary, on signature lines for emails, on school web pages. They should be recognized as categories in athletic or academic awards, where possible, and engrained in school rituals. For example, at St. Michael, each academic department recognizes its top student (scholar), its best classroom leader (leader), and its most generous, concerned student for others (disciple) at the annual awards day. 

One of the truisms about American pop culture is that we generally distrust the power of words to move people. Perhaps we’re so inundated with commercials, or tainted by manipulative political ads that we tend to dismiss their power. Perhaps we are far too reliant on videos, music or pictures to move us.  But I believe if we are intentional about reminding our communities of who we are, if we are observant enough to see this mission active in the lives of our students and are willing to tell frequent stories about what we’ve observed, our mission statements can slowly begin to change how our students and teachers understand who they are and what they are doing.  

Words can still change us—we just have to choose them wisely, use them intentionally,  and do so with great frequency!