Center aims to maximize excellence in Catholic schools
Leadership group seeks to maintain strong Catholic identity, pool resources

By Tracy Rusch
Special to your Catholic Herald

MILWAUKEE — The 119 elementary schools, 13 high schools and five colleges that make up the Archdiocese of Milwaukee give students “an education you can have faith in,” according to its motto. Thus, it’s only natural that this education should continue to grow and improve.

The July 1, 2008 establishment of the Academics and Faith Center of Excellence (AFCOE) is just one of the five Centers of Excellence that make up the initiative meant to transform local and global communities into centers of faith, hope and charity.

“The Academics and Faith Center of Excellence is the cornerstone, the foundation from which we’ll achieve and sustain excellence in our Catholic schools,” Chuck Allison, director of the office for Catholic schools, said in an e-mailed response to your Catholic Herald. “Our Catholic schools’ ‘reason for being’ is fundamentally about evangelization and generational succession of our Catholic way of life.”

AFCOE is a leadership group, not a building in the traditional sense of a center. Susan Burns Nelson, director of AFCOE, works with a steering committee comprised of 11 other members, including Allison, who represent the clergy, elementary principals, higher education, the archbishop’s education commission and people who support Nelson’s efforts and help to access resources.

“There was a very conscious effort to make sure we brought into the room very strong people in both areas of faith formation and academics,” Nelson said.

As director of the AFCOE, Nelson oversees the process of maintaining a strong Catholic identity and academic excellence in the schools.

The Centers of Excellence, Nelson hopes, will build the foundation of what becomes a national model.

“It’s very exciting because it’s just a complete new structure,” Nelson said of the Centers of Excellence. “In this office, we don’t say ‘Think outside the box.’ We say, ‘There is no box.’”

AFCOE, partially funded by the Faith In Our Future Campaign Capital Campaign, developed from the May 2008 organization of the Catholic Schools Strategic Education Plan. When Allison became director of the schools’ office in March 2007, he and more than 200 people contributed to the plan’s development.

“As an office for schools, there was a day when there were 20 people in this office, now there are four and one part time,” Nelson said. “I mean, you have to look at this and say, ‘We simply can’t continue to function as we did. It’s not efficient and we don’t have the power.’”

By moving toward a data-driven approach to academics, Nelson said that the AFCOE will help schools target the support students need and make greater use of resources like the colleges and universities, as well as federal funds that are untouched by some schools and needed by others.

“We have tended to operate in districts, geographically, and the needs of schools don’t just naturally fall into your geographic region,” Nelson said. “We need to kind of break out, so another goal would be to match schools with like needs and not be constrained by what district they’re in.”

In May, school principals will come together for what Nelson called a “data retreat.” With standardized tests data and other data in hand, they will be guided on how to systematically sort through it to target the needs of their students.

Lynn Ann Reesman, principal of St. Mary’s Visitation Elementary School, Elm Grove, is a member of the AFCOE steering committee who brings to it her background in education and theology at the college level, and in public and Catholic schools. Her school has already used data to analyze strengths, which they celebrated, and weaknesses that they needed to address.

“The difference is that with the Center of Excellence, there will be a number of principals sitting down and saying, ‘Ah, we’ve got the same trend in our school,’” Reesman said.

With more than 30 years in education, Reesman understands the complex world of learning.

“You can’t have one single answer that’s going to meet the need of every child, of every teacher, of every school,” she said. “All of those things get shaped by the individuals who are there and that’s part of the dignity of Catholic education.”

The AFCOE steering committee also includes Judy Birlem, principal of Milwaukee’s Prince of Peace elementary school for four years, who has been active in the archdiocesan curriculum for more than 10 years. Birlem said the center is the key to improving the archdiocese as a whole by determining the best practices for teaching from the time the students enter school until college graduation.

“This center will bring us together with all the elementary (schools), the high schools, and the colleges to provide the best education possible for all of our students,” she said.

With the help of the Greater Milwaukee Catholic Education Consortium, the five Catholic colleges and universities in the archdiocese, and the School Theology and Faith Formation Group, which focuses on faith formation programming, the AFCOE will identify needs and then determine how to meet them.

As the AFCOE faith formation teams begin the pilot program in the high schools at the end of January, Allison said the other Centers of Excellence, beginning with the Centers of Leadership and Investment, will form in the 12 to 18 months that follow. Each center will have a director and a 10-15-member steering committee whose members will serve one to three years.

“The other Centers of Excellence — Leadership, Investment, Community and Infrastructure — are also critical,” Allison said in an e-mail. “They are like fingers on a hand. They complete the handshake from good to greatness.”

The centers’ main challenges lie in the funding needed for startup. Allison said that AFCOE’s initial recommendation was more than $200,000 to pay salaries and benefits and operational expenses to lead a steering committee team and run the center, but he thinks the team is motivated by a feeling of a limitless initiative.

“In some ways, the Center of Excellence starts from us as individuals,” Allison said. “If we have a sense of excellence and passion for what we want to achieve, you know, that’s where it all starts and then it builds and it builds to be within the people we interface within our jobs and in our communities, in our parishes, in our schools and in the archdiocese as a whole and beyond. And so, conceptually, the Center of Excellence is maximizing the potential of a lot of talent across the entire archdiocese.” ___________________________________________________________________

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