by Paul Morisi
Every January, Catholic schools across the country celebrate Catholic Schools Week with Masses, assemblies, and open classrooms. It is a joyful week, but it is largely a family celebration, a time for those already inside our school communities to give thanks for what we share.
But before that, from Nov. 15-21, the National Catholic Educational Association invites us to do something different: to turn outward and let our neighbors discover what we already know.
Discover Catholic Schools Week was added to the calendar at the request of Catholic schools themselves. Fall is when families begin the important work of choosing a school. They visit, they ask questions, they compare.
The week gives Catholic schools a shared national moment to welcome prospective families, donors, educators, and community members, and to show them what makes a Catholic education worth choosing.
The daily themes read almost like a map of the people who make a Catholic school what it is. It begins on Sunday with our parish families, because every Catholic school is first a ministry of the Church.
Then come our students, our parents, and our educators, followed by the faith communities that surround us, the donors whose generosity keeps our doors open, and the alumni who carry what they learned into the world.
These are not categories on a calendar.
They are the teacher who stays late to run a club, the parents who set up the cafeteria for the pancake breakfast, the pastor who knows the children by name, the graduate who comes back to coach, and the benefactor who quietly makes tuition possible for a family that could not manage it alone.
No single group makes a Catholic school.
All of them together do.
Here in the Diocese of Brooklyn, that picture is as varied as the neighborhoods we serve. Our academies and parish schools
stretch from the Rockaways to Long Island City, from Bay Ridge to Greenpoint. They serve families who have belonged to their parishes for generations and families who arrived last year. They teach in dozens of languages.
And yet, walk into any one of them, and you will find the same things: Teachers who know every child by name, older students looking out for younger ones, and a day that begins and ends in prayer.
Our schools are also places of real academic ambition. Across the diocese, Catholic schools are offering high school-level coursework to middle schoolers, partnering with local colleges, expanding STEM and the arts, and preparing students to thrive in the high schools of their choice.
At Bay Ridge Catholic Academy, where I serve as principal, our eighth graders can earn high school credit in Algebra I, and our History Scholars program with St. Francis College gives middle schoolers a taste of college-level study.
Schools throughout Brooklyn and Queens could tell similar stories, each in its own way. But programs only tell part of the story. What families say again and again is that they feel something when they walk through the doors of a Catholic school.
They see a place where faith is not a subject squeezed into the schedule, but the air everyone breathes. They see children formed not only to succeed, but to serve. That is what Discover Catholic Schools Week is really about: giving families the chance to feel it for themselves.
So, to parents weighing their options this fall, I offer the same invitation Jesus gave the first disciples who asked where he was staying: “Come and see.”
Visit a Catholic school in your neighborhood during open house season. Sit in on a class. Talk to the teachers, the parents, and the pastor. Ask the hard questions.
What you discover will speak for itself, because what you will be meeting is not a building or a brochure. It is a community built year after year by people who believed it was worth building.
That is the beauty of this week. The discovery runs both ways. Families discover our schools, and our schools are reminded of what we have been given. Come and see for yourself.
We will be waiting at the door.
Paul Morisi is the principal of Bay Ridge Catholic Academy.