Where St. Elizabeth High School once stood for almost a century in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood, a renovated school has arisen with a new spirit, a new mission and even a new name: Cristo Rey De La Salle.
It’s a school where students are expected to earn their subsidized tuition by working one day a week at a local company that foots a good chunk of the bill.
And it’s touted as the country’s first Catholic high school to implement a “summit learning” platform that uses data to track students’ progress and show teachers where improvements are needed. The system was created by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a company started by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.
The new Fruitvale school, which opened Wednesday to an inaugural freshman class of 69 students, is the 35th in the “Cristo Rey” network of urban high schools throughout the country that only enroll low-income students. San Jose has one, as does San Francisco and Sacramento.
Cristo Rey De La Salle’s mission is to exclusively serve low-income students, whose parents will pay $250 to $2,500 a year depending on their circumstances.
Annual tuition at the new school at 1530 34th Ave. is about about $18,000, and students will be expected to pay off at least a fraction of the bill through their labor. The school runs a work-study program that has all students working once a week at a partnering company, which in turn foots about half of the tuition, said school spokeswoman Caitie Nolan. The rest of the tuition is mostly covered through scholarships.
On average, parents will pay about $1,000 a year per student, Nolan said.
Some companies participating in the program include Blue Shield of California, Deloitte consulting, Heffernan Insurance Brokers, Kaiser Permanente, Chevron, One Toyota of Oakland and Saint Mary’s College of California.
The school’s staff and parent volunteers will drop students off and pick them up from their work-study shifts. The students will work one shift a week and two shifts a week once a month.
Full story at East Bay Times.
Immaculate Conception Academy in San Francisco is a Cristo Rey school and enjoys great success with a certain kind of kid (and former students of mine who attend love it). Our Catholic high schools have become too “preppy” and focus too much on the kids who’s aim at the top colleges to the exclusion of those with other talents.
These schools implement Common Core Curriculum. See this page: https://www.cristoreynetwork.org/schools/innovative-model
Whistle blower Charlotte Iserbyt is right. Once charter schools became the norm, all schools, religious or not, will be foreced, by law, to have CC.
Charlotte Iserbyt: Common Core (CC) is being used as a very effective DIVERSION from the serious problem of tax-supported school choice which will lock up ALL children worldwide in the computerized Communist / OBE workforce training system necessary for a planned global economy. This is the communist education system referred to by Professor Eugene Boyce, University of Georgia, where “they do not educate for jobs that don’t exist”—a.k.a., “quota system.” This…