CRISTO REY NETWORK

The Cristo Rey Network is focused on changing the college completion reality for low-income youth and aims for our graduates to achieve a four-year college completion rate comparable to the national rate (62%) for students from high-income families.

To accomplish this audacious goal, the Cristo Rey Network – the largest education network in the U.S. serving exclusively low-income youth – is comprised of 38 college- and career-preparatory schools that deliver an integrated rigorous academic program with four years of professional work experience and robust support to and through college. Our formational educational model serves 12,300 students across 24 states and collectively claims 23,100 graduates. Our innovative approach to inner-city education equips students from families of limited economic means with the college and career readiness skills to fulfill their life’s dreams.

Our strategic pillars of focus include ensuring academic excellence across our schools; operating a high-performing Corporate Work Study Program nation-wide; supporting a data-driven college counseling and alumni advising framework; opening new schools – with a growth plan to have 50 schools serving 20,000 students by 2020; and sustaining a culture of continuous improvement and accountability through leadership development programming.

The Corporate Work Study Program is the hallmark of a Cristo Rey education and demands the most robust strategic focus. To ensure the program’s vitality, every two years the Cristo Rey Network must renew our special authorization with the U.S. Department of Labor that permits all Cristo Rey students to work one full day each week in an entry-level, professional job. Our schools work diligently with 3,500 Corporate Partners across the country that employ a team of students who work in Accounting, Communications, Customer Service, Human Resources, Legal, Logistics, and Tax Departments and perform a wide-range of responsibilities on the job: data entry, Spanish-English translation services, document management, internet research, IT support, reception, and other office tasks. Last school-year, students collectively earned $80 million to pay for their own private, college preparatory education at a Cristo Rey school.

Our education approach was reaffirmed in U.S. News and World Report: "In a world where the social fabric is fraying, Cristo Rey weaves it back together. Businesses, schools, churches, families, children, and communities all come together in the mutual pursuit of providing quality education. As a result, students enjoy a more diverse experience than they would get in a traditional educational setting; co-workers get to meet, mentor and learn from students who may come from a different background than their own; support for the school is cultivated in the community; and families are able to afford an education that would otherwise be beyond their reach.”

As the engine of excellence, accountability, and growth, the 24-member national office team, based in Chicago, collaborates with each school to design and deliver programming that advances the quality and vitality of the movement.

To accelerate impact, in June 2018, the Cristo Rey Network national office increased its personnel capacity to refine, expand, and lead these efforts, which involves a series of interrelated initiatives to achieve our objectives.

The Cristo Rey Network national office is charged with ensuring all schools’ fidelity to our shared Mission Effectiveness Standards and to build capacity of the employees at all 38 Cristo Rey schools to accomplish our common mission. To this end, the national office plans, designs, and implements comprehensive professional development for the academic staff, college counselors and alumni advisors, CWSP teams, and school leaders at the 38 schools in operation and the four schools in the planning stages.

Per validated third-party data, our young people are currently enrolling in college at (90%) rates higher than the matriculation levels of high-income students (78%) and completing bachelor’s degrees (34%) at more than three times the rate of the entire low-income population nationwide (11%). For our classes of 2015, our six-year university completion rates are on target to approach or exceed 50% – progress towards our minimum goal of 62%, the national completion rate for students from families in the highest income quartile.

This data reflects real progress that affirms the power of our model; however, the Network has more ambitious goals for our graduates. To respond to the changing needs of the expanding Network over the next five years, the Cristo Rey Network is implementing a programmatic campaign, “Putting Education to Work.” This five year strategic programming campaign is infusing $32.3+ million into our schools and graduates in college to scale innovative, evidence-based solutions across our organization’s strategic pillars of focus, previously referenced.

“Putting Education to Work” will accelerate and sustain the movement for continued growth and deeper impact. The long-term impact of the Cristo Rey movement resulting from this campaign is transformational. As Cristo Rey’s deserving young people complete college and secure prosperous jobs, their success breaks the cycle of poverty, impacting numerous lives - the students, whose life trajectories will be transformed through the empowerment of formational learning; their friends and siblings, who witness a model of perseverance and work ethic among low-income adolescents; parents of students, who witness opportunity opening for their children, and often develop new motivation to develop their own skills; and the broader community that employs, mentors, and in turn is served by these young men and women.