What started as a small-scale effort out of Chicago’s Cabrini Green neighborhood to create a safe learning environment has grown into a 600-student-strong, faith-based educational organization in North Lawndale.
Holy Family School, 3415 W. Arthington St., celebrates its 40th school year with a back-to-school event at its campus on Aug. 23 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Throughout the school year, there will be programming to honor past and present board members, families, staff and students.
The Holy Family School offers educational opportunities from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade. Among the school’s successes over the past 40 years was the construction of the Holy Family Ministries Center in North Lawndale’s Homan Square, which opened to students in 2008.
Cheryl Collins, CEO of Holy Family Ministries, told Austin Weekly News that one of her personal points of pride is when alumni register their children to attend Holy Family School.
“It melts my heart,” she said, to “bring your children to us and you trust that we’ll do a good job with them. That’s a milestone right there.”
Another accomplishment is that every year, nearly 100% of eighth graders are accepted to schools that offer college prep, selective enrollment, or are charter, magnet or suburban schools.
That’s an especially significant statistic considering that many Holy Family School students start at the school in fourth or fifth grade, Collins said, and are performing below grade level when they do. Because some of the high schools Holy Family School graduates attend can have tuition over $20,000, Holy Family Ministries also created a scholarship program to help fund secondary education.
While tuition at Holy Family School is $2,800 a year for the average family, about 70% of the school’s budget is covered by donors, some of whom live in other states or have been giving since the school was founded in 1985.
“Holy Family is successful because our village has extended far and wide,” Collins said. “When you say, ‘It takes a village,’ don’t just think locally.”
Collins said parents are often willing to pay to provide a different education than surrounding public schools can, or because their kids aren’t succeeding at those schools.
“I’m not knocking public schools. I’m a product of them. But I think they have issues that are bigger than what they can address due to lack of funding and lack of resources,” Collins said. “I’m really excited that we were able to come into a neighborhood that was hungry for this type of education and make it affordable to our families. That is something that we have done for 40 years.”
“What we’re trying to do is to attract that family that, yes, this might be a sacrifice you make, this might be a struggle for you, but you’ve chosen to invest in this education because you want something different from what you were getting for your child.”
Looking ahead, Collins said she hopes Holy Family School grows to the point that it needs a new building or another location. She says she wants to see students become subject matter experts and for educators to come to Holy Family School to learn about how they’re teaching.
She added that she hopes to provide resources to families outside of educational opportunities. For example, during the COVID -19 pandemic, Holy Family Ministries partnered with local restaurants to give away meals to its students and their families.
“We discovered how many needs our families have, from housing to food to employment. I would love to figure that piece out. How do we help our families more?”
History of Holy Family
Holy Family School’s story starts in Cabrini Green with the Holy Family Lutheran Church. The church’s pastor, Rev. Charles Infelt, and parishioners started a grassroots program to provide an alternate place of learning to young people living in the area.
“They were needing a place for the children of Cabrini, particularly the children of the congregation, to go to a school that felt safe,” Collins said. She added that parishioners said they “‘also want a place rooted in spiritual or Christian values so that our children will learn how to be agents of change throughout the city.’”
In 1985, a few miles outside Cabrini Green, Holy Family Lutheran Church launched a school that had 40 students its first year. In 1999, Holy Family Ministries was born after a board of directors was created.
Throughout the years, Collins said the school had various locations around Chicago.
“Every year, enrollment was growing,” said Collins, who became principal of the school in 2004, when it was located on the border of West Garfield Park.
As the school continued needing more space for its students, the Holy Family Ministries board of directors initially searched for a vacant school to make its own, but ended up buying property in North Lawndale’s Homan Square to build a 45,000-square-foot campus from the ground up.
The $9 million capital project opened in 2008 and created a permanent home for Holy Family Ministries programs and services. That fall was the first school year at the campus for about 140 students. It was also the year that both the after-school program Adventures in Learning and Little Learners Academy early childhood education began.
“Our families are working families. They can’t just come at 3 p.m. and pick up their children,” Collins said. “Then in the summer, parents wanted a place to have their children stay.” So, Adventures in Learning extended for seven weeks into summer. Attendees aren’t required to go to school at Holy Family.
“We often have students who stay for the school year. They’ll enroll because they really like the program, they really like the staff, and they really like the building,” Collins said.
The school at Holy Family grew as it merged with Bethel Lutheran School in 2009 and St. Gregory Episcopal Boys School the following year. 2010 was also the year the school was officially renamed Holy Family School, which had 300 students in preschool through eighth grade at that point.
Today, Holy Family Ministries teaches about 600 students across its school, Adventures in Learning, the Little Learners Academy and the Peace Exchange program.
Peace Exchange
Dr. Susan Infelt Work, sister of Rev. Charles Infelt, was CEO of Holy Family Ministries in 2013 when she started the violence prevention initiative, the Peace Exchange. She noticed violence and crime in North Lawndale and wanted to protect her students from it.
“How do we respond? What do we do besides educate children, who are leaving us at the age of 13 or 14, right around the time where they might be wooed to join a gang or to be involved in activities that are not in their best interest?” Collins said of the question that started the Peace Exchange.
The Peace Exchange has two components. The Peace Builder part of the initiative requires participants — typically young adults ages 18 to 24 — to study for 80 hours to learn about causes of, and solutions to, violence. Every 18 months, a new cohort of no more than 10 participants visits prisons and speaks to offenders and victims of violence. They also travel to communities similar to theirs.
“They’re meeting people who are their ages who encounter some of the same challenges they do: food deserts, unemployment, trauma in the home, dysfunction. They basically learn we’re more alike than different, no matter where we live, no matter what we look like,” Collins said.
When these students return, they have to teach 1,000 people — ranging from fifth graders to adults — about what they learned. They attend speaking engagements where they share their new knowledge over the course of several months.
The Seeking Peace component of the Peace Exchange involves college-age interns who teach a four-week long series at schools, one of which is Holy Family School, on how to become an agent of change through peace.
“They’re showing them a model of how to resolve conflict without using fists and without using angry words,” Collins said. She added that Holy Family Ministries hears stories “from the principals and the dean of students at the schools regarding particular students and how this impacted or changed them, and the same for our own students who participated in the program.”
“I would love to see the Peace Exchange really blossom and take off into something more schools adopt as a model for teaching nonviolence and conflict resolution,” Collins said of another goal for Holy Family’s future. “Because I think it’s necessary, it’s needed, and it should be a natural part of a curriculum.”