...five school days a month, Adams skips the uniform and dons business attire. On those days, after a morning assembly, she bypasses the classrooms and hops instead into a van bound for Essex County College. There Adams works in the human resources department from 9:30 a.m. to 5:15 p.m. or so, scheduling résumé appointments, doing clerical work, and generally keeping the place functioning. Far from being a distraction, this opportunity to work while going to school is what drew Adams to Christ the King in the first place. “I thought it would be a good school for me to learn about business,” she says. “I would like to be an entrepreneur.”
Few teenagers are so concretely focused on their future careers. But Adams’ attitude is not unusual for the 89 freshmen at Christ the King Prep, part of a recently formed national network of Catholic schools that combine school and work. In the process, these “Cristo Rey” (Spanish for “Christ the King”) schools have stumbled on a new business model for private urban education—one that asks students like Adams to largely pay their own way.
At the 19 schools in the network (three new ones are opening this fall in Brooklyn, Detroit, and the west side of Chicago), four-student teams share entry-level clerical jobs at area employers. In exchange, these companies pay the schools $20,000 to $30,000 for each team. The subsidy of $5,000 to $7,500 per student keeps tuition low enough (usually around $2,500) that a prep school education becomes feasible for poor families.
As the article points out, this isn't a fixit for all poor urban families; the schools will not take students who are discipline problems, and will ask students to leave if they are not holding up their end of the work bargain. So the resulting group of students attending Christo Rey schools are motivated and willing to work hard for their education - but they're also poor, come from bad neighborhoods, and have no experience dealing with people in a professional environment. The schools give them a prep-school education, professional work experience and contacts they can use on their resumes, and have a college-acceptance rate far higher than public schools. By asking these students to work for their education, they're getting a far better idea of the value of it.
