More Than a Dream: The Cristo Rey Story: How One School's Vision Is Changing the World

The Cristo Rey Story

More than a Dream How One School’s Vision Is Changing the World

G. R. Kearney

Contents A Story That Needs to Be Told xi Part 1: The Vision Takes Shape 1

1

Opening the Envelope 3

2

We Wanted to Be with the Poor 13

3

What the Hell Is a Feasibility Study? 21

4

From Peru to Pilsen 35

5

A Frontier in the City 45

6

Dollars, Cents . . . and Sense 59

7

Backyard Brainstorm 71

8

A Brilliant Idea 85

9

An Uncertain Certainty 95

10

We’re Opening This School 111

Part 2: Building a School from the Ground Up 121

11

A New School in Nine Months 123

12

Where Are Those Ten Thousand Students Now? 135

13

Opening Days 151

14

First Day at Work 159

15

Working Out the Work Program 171

16

Deeper into the Red 185

xi

xii

Contents

17

What Am I Going to Do in College? 205

18

Enter the Consultants 223

19

Portland’s Calling 239

20

A Brilliant Venture . . . and a Lot of Capital 255

Part 3: The Mission Realized 267

21

Taking Initiative 269

22

Points and the Spread 277

23

Pedagogy of Humanity 287

24

Portland and Providence 299

25

Maritza and Providence 309

26

Laying Foundations 323

27

Not Just a Mission 337

28

A Historic Win 349

29

A Woman for Others 359

30

Conclusions 371

Acknowledgments 387

Sponsoring Businesses and Organizations 391

Backyard Brainstorm

I

7

n early February 1995, Rick Murray’s phone rang. It was

John Foley, a Jesuit priest he’d met a couple of years earlier. “Rick, your name has come up as someone who might be able to help us with a new project,” Foley said. “Is there any way you could meet me and a couple of other Jesuits late this week or early next week for a meeting and lunch?” They agreed to meet at St. Procopius.

It was only when he hung up the phone that Murray, a real estate attorney and developer, started to wonder what they wanted to talk to him about. Murray had an undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan in environmental design and a law degree from Loyola University Chicago, and had once worked on a debt-conversion strategy that Jesuits in third-world countries might use to benefit their ministries.

A few years earlier, Murray, who volunteers with a variety of civic and charitable organizations, was working with the Nature Conservancy on a bioreserve plan for the Great Lakes Basin and learned about a debt-conversion strategy the conservancy had used to acquire sizable pieces of land in Africa, South America, and certain third-world countries. The process fascinated Murray, and he started thinking about other groups who might be able to use variations of it for applications other than conservation.

As a student at Loyola Law, Murray had met a Jesuit, Fr. Keith Esenther, SJ, who’d spent time in Africa. Murray tracked him down

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and told him about the idea. Esenther didn’t know quite what to make of Murray’s scheme and referred him to Fr. Daniel L. Flaherty, SJ, the province’s treasurer. Flaherty, in his mid-sixties at the time, was a nononsense, old-school Jesuit. He had entered the society after graduating from St. Ignatius High School in 1947 and had gone on to serve as director of Loyola Press (the province’s publishing house), provincial of the Chicago Province, and executive editor of America, the prominent weekly Jesuit magazine published in New York. He was tapped eventually to become the province’s treasurer because of his managerial and financial experience, his desire to serve, and his pragmatic approach to just about everything. Over the phone, Murray’s idea sounded far-fetched to Flaherty, but he agreed to meet with him.

At their lunch meeting, Murray explained to Flaherty how the Nature Conservancy—or the Jesuits—could buy the bad debt of a foreign government from a bank who’d already written the debt off as a loss. Instead of trading the debt for a piece of land, like the Nature Conservancy had done, Murray proposed converting it to local currency at an advantageous rate. Flaherty, the financier of the province’s multitude of ministries, understood the consequences.

There was an opportunity to multiply the U.S. dollars that were helping fund Jesuit ministries in foreign countries. It didn’t take a treasurer to recognize that this was a good idea.

Flaherty suggested that Murray connect with Jesuits on the ground in India, Nepal, and Peru, the province’s three mission territories. “Call John Foley,” Flaherty told Murray. “He’s a Jesuit from Peru, but he’s back here raising money.” Murray and Foley went to lunch and discussed the idea. Foley didn’t completely understand how he could make it work but agreed to investigate it further when he was back in Peru. What Foley did understand, though, was that Rick Murray was uncommonly bright and seemed to want to help

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the Jesuits. And as far as Foley knew, Murray wasn’t asking for anything in return. So when the Jesuit team working on the new school couldn’t come up with a way to make it affordable, Foley called Murray. “He’s clever with numbers,” Foley had said to Ted Munz and John Costello. “Maybe he can come up with something.”

•

Joey and his mom walked on the cracked sidewalk that ran along Cermak Road on their way to Jewel, the large grocery store where they did most of their shopping. It was the middle of the afternoon late in the winter of 1995. The snow had finally melted away, and there was a hint of spring in the air. Joey pushed a small four-wheel grocery cart past the windows of a dollar store, which displayed rows of tall glass candles decorated with images of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

This was their first trip to Jewel in several weeks. It had been a hard winter, with an ice storm followed by a snowstorm in January.

All the schools were closed for a couple of days. The snow didn’t melt right away, and the sidewalks were treacherously icy, making the small grocery cart almost impossible to push. So instead of walking to Jewel, eight blocks away, they had walked the three blocks to Walgreens. Their money didn’t go as far at Walgreens, but the trip to Jewel was just too much for Joey’s mom.

The hard winter was part of it, but Joey’s mom was also sick.

Exhaustion was a symptom, but she never mentioned it to Joey.

Exhaustion, nausea, and weakness had put her in the hospital back in 1992, when Joey was seven. In addition to those symptoms, she’d suffered a searing pain in her stomach. Joey remembered her being gone at the hospital for three weeks or a month. For most of that time, he lived with his grandma.

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And then one day his mom came home. As far as Joey could see, she was fine; she hadn’t changed. What she knew, though, was that scar tissue was overtaking her fifty-year-old liver. The condition was called cirrhosis. The scar tissue, which the doctors said usually resulted from hepatitis or chronic alcohol abuse, would grow and grow, taking over a little more of her liver each day. It wasn’t curable and would eventually take her life.

She wanted to know when. They told her three years.

When she returned from the hospital in 1992, she didn’t tell Joey any of this. By the winter of 1995, she figured she was close to the end of her life. A lot of parents pushed their children to get out of the house and make friends, play in the neighborhood, and join team sports. But Dolores Garcia didn’t push her son to do any of those things.

She was forty-three when she had Joey. She hadn’t planned on having a child and thought of his arrival as a miracle. “God broke the mold when he made you,” she often told him. Joey was her angel; he’d changed her life. As soon as she’d become pregnant, she’d stopped the drinking and partying that had been habitual since her teenage years. She realized now that she hadn’t stopped soon enough. She knew, too, that she’d eventually have to say good-bye to her son and that every moment spent with him—including a walk to the grocery store—was precious.

At the grocery store, they loaded their cart mostly with bread, rice, cereal, tortillas, and potatoes. They bought very little meat and few fruits and vegetables. Their grocery money came out of the welfare check. Joey says his mom “could stretch a dollar with the best of them.” The welfare checks were not calculated to include her nephew Nick, who didn’t get along with his mother and had been living with Joey and his mom for months. Joey’s mom would figure out a way

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to feed Nick as long he needed to stay there. “She didn’t want to see him fail,” Joey explains.

By the time they got home with the groceries, it was dark. As soon as they stepped into the apartment, Joey’s mom told him to get started on his homework, and he did.

•

As Rick Murray climbed the concrete steps to the old brick rectory just north of St. Procopius, he was still wondering about the nature of the meeting he was about to attend. Whatever it was, the Jesuits had offered to buy him lunch, and the aroma of tortillas and grilling steak drifting up Allport Street past the small houses and beatup cars already had him looking forward to the meal. Murray rang the bell and was ushered through the windowless door and up three long creaky staircases to a dusty fourth-floor office. Munz, Foley, and Costello were waiting for him there. Murray, who wore a suit for the meeting, was taken aback by Munz’s casual attire—blue jeans and an untucked shirt. What exactly are they working on? he wondered.

The three Jesuits began a long-winded explanation of the work they were doing in the grade school and after-school program at St. Procopius. They introduced Munz’s Pilsen Project to Murray, who was trying to connect it in his mind to the debt-conversion plan.

Then they told him there was a piece missing in the work they were doing—and that piece was a high school. The school would be in the neighborhood and would be created explicitly for students from the neighborhood, offering them a high-quality college-preparatory education. Munz, Foley, and Costello became more animated as they talked about the plan to open a high school. They described to Murray the enormous need in the neighborhood and the extensive

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research they’d done. They talked about the many difficulties facing young men and women in the neighborhood: overcrowded schools, high dropout rates, teen pregnancy, gangs, drugs, and crime.

Looking back on the meeting, Murray says, “It was clear to me that this was a group of people who got it. They understood the needs of the population they were trying to serve, and they had great intentions. It was clear, too, that they didn’t have a very good sense of how they were going to do any of it.”

The three Jesuits explained that the new school would educate two thousand students when it reached full enrollment—roughly the same number as Loyola Academy, the largest Jesuit high school in the United States, would have after opening its doors to women in the fall of 1995. The new school would make an effort to connect with the community and would respect the culture of the students and the parents in a way that most private schools—and almost every public school—seemed unable to do. It would offer classes in English and Spanish. And it would be tuition free.

“That’s wonderful,” Murray said. “Sounds like it would clearly benefit the people in the neighborhood. But I’m not sure why you’re telling me all this. I mean, I’m not very well connected. I’m not very wealthy and couldn’t even come close to paying for this kind of thing. I’m in the real estate business. I can probably help you find a site. I’m just not real sure what you want me to do, or what you’re asking me to do.”

“No, no,” said Foley. “We’re not asking you to do any of that. It’s just that, well, it seems like you’re clever with numbers. We’re hoping you can help us figure out how we might be able to do this.” It suddenly became clear to Murray. They were looking for an idea. His debt-conversion scheme must have impressed Foley. They wanted

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him to help them figure out how to finance this new school. Maybe he could help after all.

“Okay,” he said. “That helps me understand.”

Thanks to his work on a piece of legislation designed to restructure the tax system and education funding in Illinois, Murray had a rough sense of the cost per student in Illinois high schools. He ran the numbers quickly in his head. “Well, in very general terms, to run a school like this and keep it tuition free, you’re probably talking about having an endowment of thirty million dollars. But that assumes you already have a building. If you don’t have a building, the money you will need to get started is obviously going to be considerably higher.

Do you have funds for an endowment that size?”

They shook their heads.

“Have you begun to identify donors who could make lead gifts toward an endowment?”

They shook their heads.

“Do you have a building?”

They shook their heads.

“Do you have the land that you’ll put the building on?”

They shook their heads.

“Okay,” Murray said, “let’s try to get at this a different way. What do you have right now?”

Ted Munz reached for his briefcase. “Well, we’ve got a draft of a mission statement,” he said. He handed Murray a copy of the document, much of which was taken from the feasibility analysis that he and Gartland had completed. Murray fought back a smile. “I can remember thinking, These guys have been here for two years, and all they have is a mission statement.” He took the document and flipped through it. It was “impressive,” he admits, and much more than a

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three-line mission statement. “Well,” Murray said to the three, “this is a great document, but you’re going to need a lot more than this to get a school going. If you’d like me to think about this, just to see what I come up with—” “Yes,” Foley said, “that’s what we want. Just think about it. See what you come up with.”

“Okay,” Murray said, “that’s something I can do. But I’d like to ask you some questions about these students, about who they are, what they want, what they need.” Munz suggested they discuss it over lunch.

Murray picked their brains over lunch at a small Mexican restaurant that had already become a favorite of the Jesuits. “What are these kids like?” he asked. “What are their hopes? What are their fears? What are their lives like? What do they do for fun? What are their homes like? What about their families?” Munz, who had done a great deal of research on the population and had reviewed all of Gartland’s, fielded most of the questions.

A picture of the school’s potential students began to emerge. They were the children of Mexican immigrants. They themselves, however, had very little memory of their homes or their parents’ homes in Mexico. They didn’t feel Mexican. But because of the color of their skin, they were not allowed to be totally American. They were raised in religious families but attended public schools. They spoke Spanish at home but were usually called on to speak English at school. Being bilingual was a hindrance to their education—although someday it might become an asset—because typically they hadn’t mastered either language. Few of the students excelled in school. Those who didn’t excel tended to drop out—often to take care of younger siblings or work to help their parents pay the bills. Sometimes they dropped out because they’d entered a gang and found they could

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The high school–aged make a lot more money selling drugs in an alley students in the for a few hours than their parents made in a neighborhood didn’t week of work. speak of their futures These kids were generally poor. In some in the way their peers cases, their families relied on monthly welfare in suburban schools checks and food stamps. Others turned to the did. The students in local church’s food bank. These students, for the the neighborhood most part, didn’t travel. In fact, some of them simply didn’t know there were had never even left the neighborhood. The limits opportunities beyond they experienced every day—educationally and their neighborhood. economically—also extended into their futures.

The high school–aged students in the neighborhood didn’t speak of their futures in the way their peers in suburban schools did. The students in the neighborhood simply didn’t know what else was out there. They didn’t know there were opportunities beyond their neighborhood.

At the end of lunch, Murray said that he would set aside some time to think about options for the new school and would then report his ideas back to them. They walked back to Allport Street, where Murray had parked, and the Jesuits thanked him for coming. Just before Murray pulled away, he rolled down the window and said, “One last question. When are you guys planning on opening this place?”

Murray recalls now, “I was thinking ten years, five at the earliest.”

“Next fall,” Munz said, smiling.

“Okay,” Murray said, nodding to them. He drove off, thinking, They don’t have anything ready—there’s no way they can open a school like this in eighteen months.

•

80

They didn’t want to open a school that would rely solely on charitable contributions [and] would not be sustainable for the long-term—one had only to look at the handful of Catholic schools closing their doors that very year.

The Vision Takes Shape

Rick Murray had scheduled a block of

five hours in his calendar to sit and think about how to pay for the new Jesuit school in Pilsen. It was an unseasonably warm day for early March in Chicago, so Murray donned a light jacket and took a calculator out to the deck behind his house in suburban Wilmette, where he would do his thinking.

To Murray, it seemed a shame that the Jesuits needed to open this school. It was indicative, he knew, of the struggles of the education system in America. The Jesuits were right; there was a very real need. But how could they meet it?

Munz, Costello, and Foley had made it clear they didn’t want to open a school that would rely solely on charitable contributions.

That type of school, they feared, would not be sustainable for the long-term. For proof, one had only to look at the handful of small Catholic schools set to close their doors that very year. Those schools had relied on charity, but they had gotten to the point where the charity of their parishioners and the small amounts of tuition they collected simply couldn’t pay the bills.

One way around relying on charity was to create an endowment.

The school would rely on charitable contributions only for as long as it took to raise thirty or forty million dollars. Once the school had that money, it would be able to offset the annual budget with interest income generated from the endowment. But the Jesuits didn’t think they could raise that kind of money in the time they had. Murray wondered why they were in such a rush. Why did the school have to open in 1996? Why not 1998? All of this would be easier with more time. He didn’t think they’d be able to pull it off, but he had

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to assume they would. Building a forty-million-dollar endowment in less than two years was out of the question.

An idea came to him. The school could have endowed faculty chairs, much like those at colleges and universities. He calculated what he thought it would take to fund a faculty position annually. Then he figured the endowment that would be needed to spit out that much interest income. The gift totals were under a million dollars, but not by much. And it was still an endowment. Then Murray thought about endowing student chairs instead of faculty chairs. Not a bad idea. And it would get the size of a gift down even further. But it was still an endowment. The Jesuits would still have to raise roughly thirty million dollars to make it work. And they didn’t intend to do it that way.

Murray sat back in his chair and took in the backyard. Spring was just around the corner. The grass would soon turn from brown to green. Then, inexplicably, Robert Moses popped into Murray’s mind.

Moses, who lived from 1888 to 1981, was largely responsible for building the infrastructure of modern-day New York City. Though Moses never held elected office, he was widely considered to be the most powerful man in New York City from the 1930s to the 1950s.

His vision led to the creation of most of the highways—and bridges and tunnels—running into and out of the city. He’s a controversial historical figure because he favored highways over public transportation and is sometimes blamed for the demise of the South Bronx and Coney Island’s amusement parks and for the Brooklyn Dodgers leaving New York. But Murray wasn’t thinking about all that. He knew a bit of Moses’s story, and he knew that Moses funded many of his projects with revenue generated from tolls collected on the bridges and tunnels he’d built. Travelers were only paying nickels and dimes at the tolls, but there were millions and millions of travelers. Eventually, that meant millions of dollars.

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Basically, Moses had developed a system that channeled countless small revenue streams into the same pot. Murray knew that to avoid having an endowment, the school needed some of Robert Moses’s nickels and dimes. It needed revenue.

But revenue from what? Murray was in real estate. He had worked on scores of real estate deals and had seen all sorts of creative projects designed to generate revenue. Maybe the Jesuits could invest heavily in a building for the school that would have other uses, and the revenue generated from those uses could cover the annual cost of operating the school.

He punched numbers into the calculator. Then he punched in more numbers. He concluded that, given the cost associated with developing a suitable piece of property in Chicago and the amount of capital that would be required to operate a school for two thousand students, there was no way they could finance it just with proceeds from a building.

Murray racked his brains. Nickels and dimes. Streams of revenue.

Where were the streams of revenue in a high school? Murray thought back to his years at the Roeper School in Detroit. That high school had been very different from what this one would be. It was small, and it catered to gifted children. Because of its economic and social diversity, it had been remarkably progressive for its time.

The founders, George and Annemarie Roeper, were refugees from Germany. They had fled from the terror of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich and had opened a school in response to it. They wanted to do their part to ensure that a powerful minority with evil intentions would never again be able to so easily dominate an unchallenging majority.

So they opened a school that would address the complex emotional and academic needs of gifted children. The school was located just outside of Detroit, where the Roepers lived.

Rick Murray had spent his sophomore, junior, and senior years at the school and says that it was “an absolutely extraordinary ­learning

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Maybe the students community.” The school used block schedulat the new Jesuit ing—in which students take longer classes but school could work fewer each day—before anybody called it that somewhere to earn and required every student to participate in sertheir tuition. There vice internships, known as “community duties.” were so many variables, Murray worked as a teacher’s aide, a carpenter, but Murray figured and a bus supervisor. He also held a for-credit that five students could hold down one internship in a stockbroker’s office. “The internfull-time job. ships,” he explains, “were about forming a community and strengthening the community by giving the students a sense of ownership.”

Murray tried to refocus on the problem before him. He had set aside just a few hours to think about this, not two weeks. And then it hit him: the internships at Roeper. He’d often felt, looking back on his high school years, that some of his most important learning had taken place not when he was in a classroom but when he was working. It was an amazing experience to put what he had learned to use in a real-world setting and not just in another essay or paper. The experience had convinced him that there was great value in developing an understanding of one’s talents and self-worth. In fact, that was just what Munz felt the students in Pilsen were lacking.

The internships at Roeper had been unpaid. There wasn’t a doubt in Murray’s mind, though, that he’d contributed something of value through his work. If students could add value to a business or a notfor-profit organization, they could ask for something in return.

Maybe the students at the new Jesuit school could work somewhere to earn their tuition. There were so many variables, but Murray figured that five students could hold down one full-time job. Each of the five would work one day a week. The five of them could probably earn twenty thousand dollars. If the Jesuits could get the cost per student down to

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around four thousand dollars, then they could just about offset the entire cost of running the school. Murray knew from his own experience that such a program would also offer enormous educational benefits.

But there was a lot Murray didn’t know. First of all, was such an arrangement legal? And would businesses be willing to participate?

He suspected they would, but he wasn’t sure. He tried not to focus on those questions but instead contemplated the basic idea: exchanging work for tuition. He was still on the deck, thinking. He hadn’t written anything down. Every so often he’d hammer a couple of numbers into his calculator to check the work he was doing in his head. By the time he stood up to go back inside, he was convinced he had a workable idea.

He called that night to schedule a meeting with Munz and Costello.

Inspiration

“Cristo Rey is magical.

What you see there is hope and optimism.”

—Melinda French Gates,

co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

They built more than a school—they built a future!

B

rick by brick, Chicago-area Jesuits saw their dream of starting a new college prep school for the children of Hispanic working poor come true. Student by student, they saw a better and brighter future unfold.

You’ll be truly inspired as you read how this Jesuit vision—now a national model for educational success—continues to challenge those who have much and to change the lives of those who have little.

“More Than a Dream shines a light into the soul of urban education, illuminating the extraordinary challenges and the breathtaking and transformational results of the Cristo Rey–model schools.”

—Darren Jackson, CFO of Best Buy

“Cristo Rey schools change children’s lives. This is a story that needs to be told.”

—Laura Vanderkam, member of USA Today’s Board of Contributors

“An enticing tale of inspiration, improvisation and innovation . . . A testament to the will and wisdom of a hearty lot who believed in poor kids and who had faith that the impossible is possible in urban education.”

—Jerome T. Murphy, Dean emeritus and Harold Howe II Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education

Thank you—by purchasing this book, you participate in the ongoing story of Cristo Rey Jesuit High School. G. R. Kearney and Loyola Press will donate a portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book to Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in Chicago.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8294-2576-5 ISBN-10: 0-8294-2576-4