By Maria Wiering
Governance structures are not the first thing a parent, prospective teacher or donor is likely to ask about when considering a Catholic school. But they are critically important, say Catholic school leaders in the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis.
For local private Catholic schools, efforts are underway to bolster governance practices, and schools’ relationship to each other and to the larger Archdiocese.
In a December letter to members of governing bodies of private Catholic schools in the Archdiocese, Archbishop Bernard Hebda shared recommendations a working group made to strengthen private Catholic schools’ unity while respecting subsidiarity and solidarity. All of the recommendations explicitly or implicitly involve governance — a school’s guiding policies, procedures and leaders.
“It is a mistake to think of organizational structures as merely ‘neutral space,’” Archbishop Hebda said in the letter. “Structure either provides a path for strong relationships, or it stands in the way.”
Private Catholic schools differ in governance from local parish or regional schools in that they have a policy-making board whose members are entrusted with legal and fiduciary responsibility and authority. They may vote on key hiring, funding or strategy decisions. Of the 17 Catholic high schools in the archdiocese, 16 are private Catholic schools. A number of elementary or middle schools would fall into this category as well (for example, Ave Maria Academy in Maple Grove and the lower schools at Visitation School and Providence Academy).
By contrast, parish schools — like Saint Agnes School in St. Paul, which includes the only parish high school — may have advisory boards, but those boards’ guidance is non-binding, and pastors remain ultimately responsible for decision-making.
Regional schools, often created through the merger of neighboring parish schools (such as Blessed Trinity in Richfield), generally have boards of directors that have limited jurisdiction and that share responsibility for the school with a canonical administrator appointed by the Archbishop.
Over the years, private Catholic school leaders have asked Archbishop Hebda for greater clarity in their relationship with the archdiocese and each other, he said, and in some instances, help with challenges and guidance on best practices.
Oversight of local Catholic education is one of his responsibilities as bishop, Archbishop Hebda said, and the recommendations assist him in leading “in a way that helps us to have a unified vision of what we’re striving to do” while improving collaboration between schools.
The private Catholic school recommendations also responded to priorities identified through the 2022 Archdiocesan Synod, during which parents expressed a desire for help in fulfilling their role as their children’s first teacher in the faith, as well as the 2022 publication of a document from the Holy See’s Congregation for Catholic Education titled “The Identity of the Catholic School for a Culture of Dialogue.”
After spending the 2024-2025 academic year exploring the historic and existing operating landscape for local private Catholic schools, the Private Catholic School Working Group, composed of six local and national Catholic education experts, made several recommendations to the archbishop, which he approved and shared with school leaders.
The recommendations include establishing common board member training requirements, including a local pastor on each school’s board, and assigning to every school a priest chaplain who also serves as a voting board member. The recommendations also ask schools to sign an updated “Agreement to Operate as a Catholic School” that authorizes the school to bear the name “Catholic,” and articulates a school’s responsibilities in holding that title.
Recommendations touched many aspects of school life, from safe environment policies and annual financial audits to expectations for religion teachers and liturgical norms, which are included in existing policies for all Archdiocesan Catholic schools.
They also included guidance on board composition, including size, leadership qualifications and term limits. Recommendations also outlined the ways the archdiocese is to assist Catholic schools as they work to meet these recommendations along a prescribed timeline, beginning this fall and concluding in 2029.
After receiving feedback from private schools, the Office for the Mission for Catholic Education is continuing to refine the recommendations. Steven Cunningham, associate director of educational quality and excellence in the archdiocese’s Office for the Mission of Catholic Education, said the response from school leaders has been largely positive.
Noting that best practices around governance is a priority for Archbishop Hebda, Cunningham said the effort creates both unity and “a clarity of expectation,” both for the archdiocese’s oldest and newest schools.
“Going into the future, certainly anyone who’s working in Catholic education as a school leader or a board chair, they want to be clear about what the relationship is with the archdiocese, the best way to communicate with each other and what kind of support the archdiocese can provide,” he said.
While unity is an aim, uniformity of culture is not. The recommendations seek to honor the heritage and “tapestry” of Catholic education in the archdiocese, which include several private Catholic schools that were founded by religious orders, and three that are still owned and operated by them: Bethlehem Academy in Faribault (Dominican Veritas Ministries, formerly Sinsinawa Dominicans), Cretin-Derham Hall in St. Paul (Christian Brothers of the Midwest) and Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in Minneapolis (Society of Jesus).
John M. DeJak, one of the working group members, is both a lawyer and a longtime Catholic school leader who served locally as founding headmaster at both Chesterton Academy, then in Edina, and Holy Spirit Academy in Monticello, and as a dean at Saint Agnes School. Now the director of the Secretariat of Catholic Education for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, he sees the archdiocese’s work in the context of the national Catholic school landscape.
While clarifying a bishop’s authority over education in his diocese is rooted in both his apostolic succession and canon law, the working group’s efforts also speak to the theological heart of Catholic education, DeJak said.
“Our education needs to consider our students’ last end as being children of God and destined for heaven, and that isprimarily what we are about,” he said. “We want the fullness of what the human person is about.”
Dr. Merylann Schuttloffel, professor emerita at The Catholic University of America in Washington and an internationally recognized leader in Catholic education, was also a working group member. A Minnesota native, she served from 2019 to 2021 as founding director of the Institute for Catholic School Leadership at the Saint Paul Seminary in St. Paul.
The task force’s work “is really a very important step that the Archdiocese is making to gather the flock, so to speak, of all the schools and point them in the larger direction,” she said. “Each school has its individual mission and vision, but the overarching one is the faith formation for our youngsters: To know, love and serve God in this world and be with Him in the next. And that helps us make our decisions as we go about our daily activities.”
This shared vision should be especially clear as high schools choose board members, Dr. Schuttloffel said.
“There needs to be clarification, even before someone is placed on a board, that they understand that the faith formation mission is the priority of the school, and everything else serves as part of that mission,” she added. “I think that if boards understand that, then that becomes part of the conversation when financial and policy decisions are made, which is really their purview.”
At Saint Thomas Academy, an all-boys middle and high school in Mendota Heights, school president Brian Ragatz said he appreciated the effort’s goal of greater unity among private Catholic schools. When schools make major decisions, he said, “it doesn’t just impact that school, it impacts the schools around it.”
He is proud of how well Saint Thomas Academy’s board currently works, yet the recommendations will require the school to make some adjustments for the board as existing members leave and new members are appointed, he said.
“When something like this comes across my desk, there’s obviously the thoughts of change and worry and reluctancy, because it’s something we have to do differently,” Ragatz said. “But then when you really think about it, there’s a trust in our leader and a belief that if this is something that’s important enough to him, that these things be altered, that we have to recognize ourselves as not just a private school that’s independent in the world of schools, but we are part of something” in the Church.
On Minneapolis’ Nicollet Island, DeLaSalle High School also benefits from greater clarity and unity, said its president, Patrick Felicetta, an alumnus who stepped into his role in 2023 after 16 years in other roles with the school.
The working group’s process was thoughtful, patient and intentional, he said, while acknowledging that implementing some of the archdiocese’s recommendations will “come with recalibrating” some governance approaches set by the school’s founding Christian Brothers.
“Our school was created with a handshake 126 years ago with Archbishop (John) Ireland and a Christian Brother. And so many of the relationships that built our institutions and created our communities were done predicated on the spirit of the Church,” he said. “What they (archdiocesan leaders) are doing a nice job on, over a century later … is just getting a better sense of clarity and understanding of our role within the role of the Archdiocese.”