Catholic High Schools: 20 Guiding Principles and Practices

We finished our first year as a school at St. Michael Catholic High School on Friday. The whole experience-- being hired a year in advance to design the curriculum, sell the school to prospective families, hire the first faculty, choose the mascot, create the weekly bell schedules,  and write the policy handbook--to the dedication ceremony, meeting students on the first day of school, establishing our house system, creating new traditions--has been one of the great privileges of my career.

One of the many renewing parts of this process for me has been the chance to be reflective of good practices, and specifically, good Catholic high school practices, before establishing them at our new school. I am indebted to two extraordinary Catholic high schools, Montgomery Catholic Preparatory School in Montgomery, Al and Pope John Paul II Catholic High School in Nashville, TN, for helping shape my views on these things, and being the “laboratory” for trying out these ideas and revising them over the course of my 32 year career, twenty-eight as principal. And I should thank the students of St. Michael, too, for being “down for anything” that we tried this year--they’ve simply been a lot of fun!

So here, in no particular order, are 20 principles or practices I believe are the mark of a good Catholic high school. Some are specific to being Catholic, whereas others reflect my beliefs about high schools more generally. Not everyone will agree with me, and I respect that. Our schools are worth arguing about!

1. The school must articulate a bold, optimistic vision of what students are capable of achieving through the transforming power of God’s grace in their lives. Here’s a talk I gave on “audacious optimism” at a back to school PTO night that spells out this idea more fully.
2. The school must have frequent opportunities for prayer and worship, with weekly school Mass as the “anchor” of communal life. The school should try and expose students to the full range of our Tradition, from past to present, so that students develop a fuller vision of Church practice.  Here’s what I mean.
3. The school should embrace its connection to the wider Church--its bishop, the central Catholic school office staff, the parish priests, the pope.  We are a ministry of the Church, and should celebrate that frequently. Sometimes, schools unwittingly communicate it’s a burden or annoyance! Whatever “burden” it is to be part of a whole and responsible to those vested in leadership of the whole, it’s really a “beautiful burden” (I once heard it described), giving us great stability and depth, allowing us as school leaders to speak from within an established tradition and teleos. We are not on an island!
4. The school’s schedule must allow students to develop as scholars, artists, and athletes, without forcing them to choose one over the other. The time for specialization is later. Our job is to open many doors and have students explore multiple rooms. With a “Renaissance” emphasis, students flourish, achieving balance in their lives.
5. Faculty have to be dynamically Christian, quick-witted, well educated in their field of study, must love working with teenagers, and have a hard to define “with-it-ness.” That’s what I am always looking for in a teacher prospect--if one of these features is missing, I look elsewhere.
6. Once hired, faculty must be given freedom, with accountability. I do not believe in requiring lesson plans. I do believe in requiring syllabi. I don’t believe in formal classroom visits, with an evaluation instrument in hand. I do believe in frequent “drive by” visits of 2, 3 or 5 minutes. Faculty are professionals, and must be treated as such, but must exhibit professional behavior, which includes evidence of desire to improve one’s craft. 
7. Relationships must govern the life of the school, not rules. Yes, there are rules, and if the authority of a teacher is challenged, the teacher must invoke his or her authority. But our relationships should be human ones first! Students do stumble, but they want to do the right thing most of the time, and will generally respond well a culture that “gives them space” to grow up.
8. Relationships between teachers and parents matter, too! I encourage them as much as possible. Formally, we have a “back to school” night where parents meet their children’s teachers, a “end of first quarter parent conference,” in which I encourage parents to discuss their child’s progress with each teacher, and an optional “end of third quarter parent conference” where teachers are available in their classrooms for parents to visit during a 2 hour block. We encourage families to email parents if they have concerns, and I insist faculty return those inquiries within 24 hours. If there are disagreements, I ask they be resolved face to face, not through email.
9. Schools must resist the temptation to spell out every conceivable disciplinary violation and penalty; ultimately, those in charge need the liberty to handle students as individuals, doing what’s best for them in the unique circumstances of the situation.
10. Quirky is good. Different is good. Students like a school that doesn’t follow everyone else’s script. They like acting that way, too, from time to time! We should resist what I call “template-thinking” or “plug and play” in our schools.  Each of our schools is unique!
11. Schools should be careful creators and caretakers of rituals--they determine a school’s culture. I speak to the whole school every Monday after 3rd period. We have Mass every Wednesday. The student body runs the Friday assemblies. Students and teachers were assigned into a “House” at the beginning of the year, named after the early bishops of Mobile. Just before being dismissed for the summer, students had to shake the hand of every teacher, staff and custodian in a ‘receiving line’ in the gym first--that turned out to be quite moving to teachers and students alike.
12. Schools should be “stingy” with A’s, reserving them for truly superior work. Schools should be generous with B’s, if students are working hard. If we give out A's too liberally, we're not pushing our more capable students to excel, confirming a too prevalent (and incorrect) belief we're not capable of educating the brightest kids.
13. Homework should be a consistent expectation in core classes, with the school aiming at 60-90 minutes/night for underclassmen and 90-150 minutes/night for upperclassmen. Homework should be weighted as important--we say between 25-40% of a quarter grade.
14. On a 100 point scale, no grade should ever be entered in a gradebook less than 50. I explain why here.
15. Students in a “college preparatory school” should not have the option of an academic track that is below the “standard” level. I argue for two levels for Catholic high schools-an “honors” level (to eventually include A.P.), and a “standard” level.  If the “standard” level aims at what is minimal and essential for students to learn to be ready for college, what happens in the sub-standard classes? Yes, some students will struggle in the standard track, but that’s part of their growth.
16. Faculty should be available after school to assist students needing help. Each of our teachers host “tutorials” four days a week, (sans Friday) until 4 p.m. And though we dismiss from school at 3:10, we don’t start athletic practices until 4 p.m. to encourage students to get the help they need.
17. Class time is sacred. It should be interrupted only with the principal’s consent, and then, only rarely. We must particularly “re-establish” this principle in regards to athletic scheduling and early check-outs.
18. Attendance is a student and parent’s responsibility, not the school’s. The school should insist parents own this issue. Once a student has exceeded the maximum # of excused absences, all other absences in a semester are unexcused. (I make principal exceptions for extended medical illnesses of 3 or more days, if they produced a doctor’s note). Parents get leeway in determining absences up to a certain number--in our case, 7 per semester. Everything missed after the 7th is automatically "unexcused," and work missed is given a late grade.
19. Schools should price tuitions and fees at a level they won’t need “nickle and dime” parents with fees all year long. If families need help with tuition,  schools should be generous with financial aid. If we set tuitions in light of our poorer families, we subsidize families who can afford to pay more, losing that revenue, and force ourselves to “fee” families for athletics, extra-curricular participation, etc. Those fees, coming at random times in the year, are harder for our poorer to scrounge up and pay. I explain all this here. There’s even a marketing side to this, too, which I explain here.
20. Schools should build a “culture of philanthropy” and ask all families to contribute to the school’s annual fund. Much better for schools to raise monies through charity than through fees--gifts are tax deductible!

Discipline, Mercy and Being Creative

Before I accepted my job as headmaster of Pope John Paul II High School in 2008, I had the opportunity to interview each member of the administrative team. I remember asking our Dean of Students this deceptively simple question: "Should the punishment fit the crime or the student?" "The student, " he said without hesitation. "Why?" I asked. "Because the school's job isn't to administer justice so much as it's to help kids grow up, and that means you to have to customize discipline to what best works for that child."

Exactly right! 

This means, of course, that from time to time a principal will be criticized by his or her faculty, or by other parents, or by the community at large, for how he chooses to discipline a child. He'll be labeled, charitably, "inconsistent," or less charitably, as "playing favorites" or "playing politics." But I believe that's the cost of trying to do the right thing for each child and not allowing a template or policy to dictate what the principal knows will and won't work for a kid. 

That wasn't my view of things when I first became principal. I was determined, for the sake of fairness, that I would treat each kid exactly the same. I wrote my own "handbook" for discipline, giving point values to various infractions, with certain penalties occurring at certain point totals, stair-stepping it all the way to expulsion. I tried to live by my own code early on, before tearing up the handbook and tossing it in the trash around Thanksgiving. 

Why? I became aware of family dynamics that caused certain behaviors. I learned that some teachers handled certain kids better than others. I got to know each troubled kid personally and better understood his triggers, his insecurities, when he was responding to things out of meanness or indifference, or when he was responding emotionally, almost despite himself. My "handbook" said these things didn't matter, but I knew they did. 

Shortly thereafter, I wrote an autobiographical parable:

And it so happened that a new principal, wishing to make a good impression, said "I will treat all students the same for fairness sake. " 

A few weeks later, two boys were sent to him for the same serious disciplinary incident. The principal said, "Policy dictates a three day out of school suspension for both of you." The first young man, working closely with his parents, came back to school with resolve to do better. The second young man dropped out. 

And everyone agreed the principal was fair. 

It's not a school's job to be fair, if fairness is defined as treating everyone the same. It's the school's job to be ministers of Christ and to help that young man or woman grow into the kind of person God wants him or her to be. 

Schools should be creative in finding out what "works" for a child. One Saturday morning, I had a kid meet me at the school. We drove the school bus to my house, and he had to wash and wax the bus, parked in my front drive. He hated it, but it marked the beginning of his turnaround. I've had kids do gardening, scrape gum, mop floors, run laps, be suspended from games, do community service, write letters, teach younger children, become "janitor for the week," and clean the school and adjacent neighborhoods of litter. Whatever works.  Whatever deters the bad behavior. Whatever reaches the child.

I believe Catholic schools should be very reluctant to define consequences to disciplinary infractions too specifically in its school handbook, even for the serious stuff. Better to use words like "liable for expulsion," rather than "will be expelled." That doesn't mean a school will never expel a kid--unfortunately, I may have to do that 5-6 times a year for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, expulsion is exactly the right thing to do, for the kid's sake, so that he can learn there are serious consequences for serious actions. NOT expelling may put the school in the position of an enabler of that bad behavior. 

But a school's leader, not a school handbook, should make the final call, because he knows better than a policy which penalty best fits the child.