Cristo Rey, which means Christ the King in Spanish, will open in the former Benedictine building on North Sheppard Street. (Photo courtesy Cristo Rey Richmond High School)
Students at the private Cristo Rey Richmond High School will help pay for their tuition by spending one day each week working at a local company.
The Catholic school is slated to open this fall, inviting students and families who otherwise couldn’t afford private school tuition to participate in a rigorous college preparatory academic course load four days a week. The fifth day of the school week, students will go to work for their assigned corporate company sponsor, which pays 60 percent of the student’s tuition, says Peter McCourt, the school’s president and chief executive officer. Companies such as Dominion Energy and the Bon Secours Health System pay $34,000 per year to support four students. “So it’s a win-win — maybe you’d even say a win-win-win,” McCourt says. “It’s a win for Cristo Rey as a school, it’s a win for the students and it’s a win for the company.”
At the financial services firm Davenport & Co., students will complete a monthlong “boot camp” focused on office etiquette and practices, such as how to answer the phone and communicate with their supervisors, before beginning work at the company in August. “Cristo Rey struck us as a novel approach to community engagement,” Julian Hillery, Davenport’s vice president for investments, says via email. The company will pay an estimated $20 per hour for each of the four students it sponsors, he adds, noting, “This is the first program to offer us the opportunity to have young adults work alongside our employees throughout the year.”
The Richmond school is part of a Cristo Rey Network of 35 schools across the country that seeks to open an additional two schools each year after conducting a feasibility study. Cristo Rey Richmond is the first in Virginia — the next closest school is in Takoma Park, Maryland, and another is planned for Raleigh, North Carolina.
McCourt says that in Richmond, the feasibility study took roughly two years to complete and consisted of exploring two main questions: Is there a need for educational choices for students of limited economic backgrounds in the region, and would the business community be interested in participating in such a program?
“For many of the students in Richmond Public Schools, they’re in a struggling school system that’s not performing well academically,” McCourt says, “and then of course we’ve got a high level of limited income and limited economic resource families in the region that couldn’t afford places like Collegiate, or Steward or Benedictine as private school options — despite the fact that all those schools have scholarship programs, there’s no way they could cover all the need for students who might be interested.”
This portion of the feasibility study included interviewing 300 students, 150 parents and 50 community leaders and potential sponsors to gauge interest.
The next step to determine feasibility of the new location was interest from the business community. After early conversations and meetings with prospective stakeholders, 10 companies committed during the feasibility study — including Markel Corp., McGuireWoods, Dominion and Bon Secours.
It’s a win for Cristo Rey as a school, it’s a win for the students and it’s a win for the company.” —Peter McCourt, Cristo Rey Richmond High School president and chief executive officer
“So when those four stepped forward, then quickly others did, too,” McCourt says. As of press time, more than 30 companies in the region had agreed to sponsor Cristo Rey students next year. “The business community has been very involved in Richmond around workforce development questions,” McCourt says. “The Chamber of Commerce is focused on it; lots of these companies have internal programs where they’re trying to grow their own workforce, and I think it matches with a lot of those kind of initiatives.”
Other factors considered during the feasibility study included looking at whether there are state tax credits or vouchers available for private schools; Virginia offers a tax credit scholarship program, which McCourt says helps offset some of the costs for families.
The school does not have a set income cap for admission, he says, noting that Cristo Rey will consider applicants on a case-by-case basis.
“Of course there’s outliers on both ends of it,” he says, “For a family of four, we’re looking at about $45,000 a year, but it’s all about what’s going on in terms of that household, especially if they’ve got extraneous factors like disability or medical bills, or multiple family members in the house.”
After receiving positive responses from prospective students and corporate sponsors, McCourt says, “the last piece of it was to talk to the local Catholic bishop, because it’s a Catholic school ... and resoundingly he said ‘yes,’ too, so that launched us to where we are today, which is preparing for the opening of the school in the fall.”
The school will admit 120 freshmen for the upcoming school year, and 100 to 120 students to each freshman class thereafter, with the goal of about 450 students at the four-year mark, McCourt says.
Cristo Rey President and CEO Peter McCourt (Photo courtesy Cristo Rey Richmond High School)
The curriculum will have religious elements such as traditional Catholic education, but McCourt emphasizes that students of any faith tradition, or none, are welcome at the school. Education at Cristo Rey, he says, will include learning about global and world religions, and looking at social issues through ethics and justice lenses.
The most important part for prospective students to think about is their commitment to work and school, McCourt says, adding that school staff members are aware of the challenges some students coming from public middle schools may face in terms of academic benchmarks, but attendance will be taken into consideration.
“We know from test scores and that kind of thing in the region that some of the middle schools are better than others in terms of academic preparation, so it’s not really a certain GPA we’re looking for,” he says. “I think probably the experience in middle school will be looked at more in terms of attendance — because, you know, that might be a contributing factor for ‘Do you show up for your work day?’ ”
McCourt says all applicants will be interviewed before receiving an offer of admission, and the interview will be structured similarly to a job interview, focusing on learning about students’ school and work habits, as well as their passions and aspirations.
“Our unofficial slogan is, ‘This is the school that really works!’ ” McCourt says, laughing, “I mean, you’re literally going to work one day a week — so if you’re not interested in that kind of experience, if you just want to go to high school — this is not going to be the school for you. College preparatory academics might be a little harder than what they were used to in middle school, and what they might be exposed to in high school.”
The rigorous environment seems to have paid off across the country, with the Cristo Rey Network touting an impressive 100 percent college acceptance rate. But the support doesn’t stop there, McCourt says. The idea behind Cristo Rey is to get students “to and through” college — which may mean supporting graduates for several years after they finish high school.
“We’re designed to help these students to get into school, and on a national basis, we’ve had 15,000 graduates from the other Cristo Rey schools, and 100 percent of them have been accepted to college — so we know that this works,” McCourt says, “and it’s going to work here in Richmond, too.”
