St. Joseph's goals for students are evident throughout the school.

Students know their priorities the moment they enter St. Joseph Catholic School. A sign by the front door reads, “Our Goals: College. Heaven.’’

Inside the West Tampa school’s cafeteria, boys and girls gather for Holy Karaoke, a morning program that encourages them to dance and sing, and focus on the lessons ahead.

Cartoon pumpkins belt out “Blue Moon’’ while bobbing across a giant movie screen. Sister Nivia Arias, in full habit, croons along at the pulpit before prompting her charges to recite daily affirmations.

Sister Nivia Arias oversees St. Joseph Catholic School's Holy Karaoke morning show.

“We are active learners who do our best work every day,’’ little voices say in unison. “We do the right thing at the right time.”

The saying sums up the philosophy of this 116-year-old parochial school once run by Salesian nuns. It may also be prophetic.

Like other Catholic schools across the nation, St. Joseph struggles with limited resources while trying to attract students and teachers. But a new partnership with the Diocese of St. Petersburg and the University of Notre Dame might be the right thing at the right time.

St. Joseph and another local Catholic school, Sacred Heart in Pinellas Park, are among five schools in the nation taking part in the Notre Dame ACE Academies, a pilot program in conjunction with the university's Alliance for Catholic Education that aims to strengthen Catholic schools and the communities they serve.

The idea is to boost enrollment and help schools develop better leadership, curriculum, instruction, financial management and marketing. (more…)

After reading story after story about Catholic schools closing, it was heartening this morning to instead read about an aggressive local effort to help them rebound. The Diocese of St. Petersburg, in the Tampa Bay region of Florida, has launched an ambitious plan to reverse declining enrollment and ensure that Catholic schools remain a solid part of the community bedrock that they have been for generations.

As detailed in today’s Tampa Bay Times, the effort aims to make school operations more efficient and academic offerings more rigorous. It includes a key partnership with Notre Dame University’s Ace Academies, which will help with the quality piece. And it involves increased use of Florida’s tax credit scholarship program, which gives low-income families more learning options for their kids. “It’s a reimagining of how our schools would look like in five to 10 years from now, to make them viable,” Alberto Vazquez-Matos, the diocese’s superintendent, told the Times.

In this podcast interview with redefinED in March, Christian Dallavis, director of the ACE Academies, put the Tampa Bay partnership in context. He noted Hispanics in the U.S. make up two thirds of practicing Catholics under the age of 35, and that the high school graduation rate for Hispanics is about 50 percent. “We see the future of the church is on pace to be kind of radically undereducated,” he said. But “we also have a solution in that we know Catholic schools often put kids on a path to college in ways that they don’t have other opportunities to do so.”

The success of Hispanic students is especially important in Florida, where Hispanics could be a majority in a few decades. Boosting Catholic schools with innovative partnerships and school choice programs is a bold response that offers hope for the future.