September 3, 2026
Story and photos by Maria Wiering
At Ave Maria Academy in Maple Grove, Ericka Walz has noticed that students’ specialized learning needs have grown in recent years. In Vermillion, Pam McSweeney at Saint John the Baptist Catholic School has observed the same.
Recognition of changing student needs led both experienced school leaders — from very different pre-K-8 schools on opposite sides of the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis — to a workshop at Saint Charles Borromeo in Minneapolis Aug. 17-19. For three days, small teams from their schools — and 12 others — received training to help them better identify student needs, set goals and measure improvement.
Ave Maria’s head of school since 2024, Walz said she and her team wanted to improve their ability to meet broader needs, but desired direction. “We want to be a place that welcomes all children who desire a really robust education,” said Walz, whose suburban school enrolls around 220 students, because “first and foremost, we’re a Catholic school.” McSweeney, principal of rural Saint John the Baptist — which enrolls about 120 students — shared a similar view: “I believe we’re called to do it.”
Implementing recommendations
The training, which used a framework called Multi-Tiered System of Supports, was the first major initiative from the Archdiocesan Commission on Students with Special Needs in Catholic Education. The Archdiocese’s Office for the Mission of Catholic Education convened the 17-member commission in April 2025 to examine the current special education landscape with the goal of developing recommendations on how to expand or better serve students with unique needs in its Catholic schools. Commission members made formal recommendations to Archbishop Bernard Hebda last October, which are expected to be published for Catholic schools this fall.
Leading the training was Ellen Grossman, a special education consultant, school psychologist and founder of Uptick Education, a company she launched in 2022 “to help bridge the gap” as schools aimed to address “increased student needs paired with a shortage of qualified special educators,” according to its website.
A parent of two daughters who attend Saint Joseph School in Rosemount, Grossman was also a member of the Archdiocese’s special needs commission. She called that experience “an honor in my career” for uniting her passion with faith.
In an Aug. 19 interview, Grossman explained that most of her work has been in public schools that are required to make their systems more accessible to learners with special needs.
“So for the Catholic schools to choose to make their systems more accessible because it’s the right thing to do is a different ‘why,’ and I think extremely powerful,” she said.
She describes a Multi-Tiered System of Supports — MTSS — as “the basic scientific method of education” with a long history of use, just under other names. The data-driven system recognizes three support tiers: Tier 1, which provides instruction and behavior support for all students in a classroom; Tier 2, which targets small groups of students with additional support; and Tier 3, which provides support for individuals with greater needs.
“It’s not a program that you buy,” Grossman explained. “It’s a ‘shelf’ of best practices that still allows for autonomy in your local community and responsiveness to the needs of your families, your parish, your faculty. To know that, you have data systems, you have curriculum that is aligned to your standards, you have to know how kids are doing — but what ‘books’ you choose to put on that ‘shelf’ can vary and be responsive to your own local community.”
Grossman provided the school leaders a trove of resources, but she aimed not to overwhelm. The goal, she repeatedly told them, was to take “the next best step.”
In addition to Ave Maria and Saint John the Baptist, other participating schools in this year’s training were the host school, Saint Charles Borromeo; All Saints, Lakeville; Divine Mercy, Faribault; Hill-Murray, Maplewood; Immaculate Conception, Columbia Heights; Nativity of Our Lord, St. Paul; Saint Helena, Minneapolis; Saint Joseph, West St. Paul; Saint Michael, Prior Lake; Saint Vincent de Paul, Brooklyn Park; and Transfiguration, Oakdale.
As a pilot cohort, these schools will continue to receive training and assistance through Uptick Education as they work to expand supports to meet a wider range of needs in their schools.
Improving access into Catholic schools
Megan Forgette, OMCE associate director of Catholic schools, said that the goal of the commission’s work and the training is “continuing to widen the doors a little bit more” for students with special needs.
“We can’t do all of this work all at once, knowing that when we talk about our students with special needs or those with diverse learning styles, there’s a huge range of needs this can cover,” she said in an Aug. 7 interview. “But our work is really about continuing to widen the doors of what and how we’re able to serve a wider and wider range of learners, so that slowly but surely we’re getting closer and closer to giving that gift of Catholic education to more and more of our children not currently in our Catholic schools.”
MTSS provides common language, assessment and documentation standards, along with data-collection standards for schools. Meanwhile, the system not only benefits students with special learning needs, but also all students in a classroom, Forgette emphasized.
Research shows that schools that have embraced MTSS find that strategies crafted for students with special learning needs “are actually excellent practices for all learners,” added Gayle Stoffel, OMCE associate director of Catholic school leadership who collaborates with Forgette on the initiative.
“The Lord has given us this great mystery of the human person, and we’re trying to put the building blocks in place for a very strong foundation, so that this work doesn’t fizzle out, but it becomes a reflection of who we believe children are made – as the image and likeness of God,” she said.
Sue Kerr, who oversees special education at Saint Michael Catholic School in Prior Lake, said her school team recognized that they needed to be “more systematic” in their approach to students with special learning needs, “and this really kind of helped us focus our attention that way,” she said at the end of the training.
“We got marching orders now, and I feel like it’s just going to be a great way for us to connect with what the faculty is already doing and to move them along,” she said. “Also, it’s going to be great for the kids.”
Walz said she left the training, which she attended with three other Ave Maria faculty members, feeling “very excited” about the opportunity before them. “There’s no two students that are alike,” she said, “and we also just want to do everything that we can to develop our skills and our understanding to just meet each child’s unique, God-given talents.”
With Grossman’s training, Walz added, “we know we’ve got a good sense of where to start.”