South Side center to include a small Catholic high school
Wednesday, March 1, 2006
By Neal St. Anthony, Star Tribune
The near South Side of Minneapolis will get a business-supported Catholic high school as part of a long-planned youth-development center project that recently gained a crucial partner and financial traction.
Ryan Companies, developer of the renovated Sears Roebuck complex, expects to break ground in late May on the $27.8 million Colin Powell Leadership Center on vacant land north of 4th Avenue S. and E. Lake Street. It will include a small, Jesuit-run high school that eventually will serve up to 500 low-income neighborhood kids whose tuition will be paid partly by sponsoring businesses through internship programs.
CEO Jim Ryan, President Pat Ryan and CFO Tim Gray, the three partners in Ryan Companies, have committed $4 million in cash and development-related services toward the project.
Urban Ventures, a nondenominational Christian group that operates sports, tutoring, training, parenting and other programs for several hundred working poor, launched the Powell Center fundraising drive in 2001.
The drive has the approval of the former general and secretary of state. However, despite a couple of inspire-the-troops visits by Powell, fundraising was going slowly.
The Ryans broached the idea of including a Cristo Rey Jesuit school in the Powell Center as part of a cooperative approach that would funnel some of the younger kids who participate in Urban Ventures after-school and other programs at several sites into the high school. The Ryans brought together the Wisconsin province of Jesuit priests, interested in siting a high-performance, inner-city school in the Twin Cities, and Urban Ventures, a community-rooted organization that serves 1,500 kids a year in a neighborhood with no high school.
The joint venture has accelerated fundraising beyond the halfway point.
Art Erickson, a onetime Methodist youth minister in the Central neighborhood and the head of Urban Ventures for 15 years, said the business-backed collaboration with Cristo Rey, a successful operator of about a dozen other inner-city academies nationally, will not drain away successful kids from the Minneapolis schools or private schools.
"There hasn't been a high school in this neighborhood since Central High closed in 1982," Erickson said. "There are 1,600 kids every day who leave the city for suburban schools. We're going to have a school for city kids who can stay in the neighborhood. Urban Ventures will be a feeder program for the school."
"Art and the Jesuits really had the same goal," Pat Ryan said this week. It's "to help kids in that neighborhood. Jim and I wondered if there might be a possible marriage of the two projects to maximize the efficiency of the bricks and mortar. Cristo Rey starts at 7 a.m., and Urban Ventures operates programs into the evening. It makes sense. It's an ecumenical venture."
The blooming project is a response to a problem most recently highlighted by a Brookings Institution study that said the Twin Cities will not be able to effectively reverse alarming trends of rising poverty and too few skilled workers to succeed retiring baby boomers unless it can graduate more inner-city kids from high schools. The four-year graduation rate for black, Hispanic and Indian students is under 50 percent in Minneapolis public schools.
Cristo Rey was developed in the 1990s in Chicago to provide a secondary education for impoverished immigrant kids on Chicago's southwest side. It has spread to Cleveland, Denver, Boston, Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere. Students don't need to be Catholic. But they study religion and morality, and there's a dress code. The school day and school year are longer than in public schools.
Students go to business internships one day a week. And sponsoring businesses, who have at least one kid on the job every day, pay about $27,000 annually to cover most of the tuition of several students. In that way, the students "earn" their tuition from employers at the same time they work and gain exposure to the corporate world. Families will be required to pay up to a quarter of tuition.
More than 95 percent of Cristo Rey students, who hail from median-income families of about $30,000, graduate within four years and go on to college or technical training.
Rev. David Hascka, a Jesuit priest, has moved to the Twin Cities from Wisconsin to organize the school and help with fundraising for the Powell Center.
The three-story, 170,000-square-foot building will include classrooms, auditoriums, labs, a cafeteria and a huge gym sponsored by Augsburg, Minnesota State University at Mankato, Dunwoody, Minneapolis Community and Technical College and other post-secondary schools that have committed to collaborate with the Powell Center and recruit graduates.
The movers and shakers on this one include John Thompson, a Best Buy vice president and Urban Ventures board member, and Darren Jackson, Best Buy's CFO and a Cristo Rey national board member. Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson, retired businessman Angus Wurtele, Ron and Joan Cornwell, the Carlson Family Foundation, businessmen Lowell and David Andreas, Best Buy, General Mills and Target have written checks that ranged from $400,000 to $2 million. Dozens of individuals and companies have written smaller checks and pledged to hire interns.