The work of forming students in a faithful Catholic environment is never finished for teachers, principals and school administrators across the country. Catholic Extension Society is privileged to partner with passionate staff members at Catholic schools in some of the poorest areas of the country. The presence of the Church is desperately needed in these communities to provide a quality education for young people and to help them realize their potential.
This is exactly what principal Antonio Trujillo is accomplishing at Saint Joseph Mission School in rural San Fidel, New Mexico. Trujillo arrived at the school six years ago and saved it from the brink of closure. By integrating Catholic values into the students’ everyday education, Trujillo and his staff are creating a hopeful future for the largely Native American student body in an area of the country where hope can sometimes be hard to find.
“We service about a 10,000-square mile radius of Native Americans who live in the area,” Trujillo said. “We are a mission diocese and we just don’t have the resources because there is no major source of employment or population center.”
Saint Joseph School was built in 1920 with the help of funds from Catholic Extension Society donors. Located between the Acoma and Laguna Pueblo reservations, the student body is 90 percent Native American and 10 percent Hispanic, ranging from pre-Kindergarten through 8th grade.
“We only started with 12 students and now we’re at 60 students,” Trujillo said. “I started working hard to make connections with the community to send their children here, and so we slowly built our grade levels up.”
Trujillo largely credits the school’s success to his participation in Catholic Extension Society’s Catholic School Leadership Initiative, a partnership with Loyola Marymount University that seeks to develop promising Catholic school leaders in struggling dioceses. Funded by Catholic Extension Society, Trujillo and his classmates completed courses online and at LMU to receive a graduate-level certificate in Catholic School Administration.
But the classes and certification were just a gateway to the real fruits of the program—meeting other Catholic school administrators in equally difficult situations and creating a network of support and fellowship. Trujillo said this community and going through the program gave him his mojo back, as he was beginning to feel burned out by the bleak situation of the struggling school and the endemic poverty of the area. By refocusing on the school’s true mission to be a beacon of hope and faith, Trujillo found the momentum to hire dedicated teachers and increase enrollment.
“I was able through that program to bring a sense of spirituality, a sense of Catholic identity and a sense of mission within the Catholic Church to evangelize and touch the hearts of the children we serve,” he said. “Most of them are Catholic, and we allow the children to have a sense of the traditions that come from their own traditional ways and incorporate it into the Franciscan teachings of Saint Francis, especially of ecology.”
Trujillo’s energetic positivity about the Catholic faith and the difference that faith is making in the lives of his students is contagious. On our visit, the student body gathered for a Catholic Schools Week Mass in the school’s humble chapel, presided over by a visiting priest who drove many miles to be there. The priest is one of just 12 who serve the widespread Diocese of Gallup—the only American diocese that crosses state lines between New Mexico and Arizona.
The positive environment of the school has rubbed off on the students as well. They sat in rapt attention during the Mass, singing the songs and participating in prayers. After Mass, they listened intently as the governors of the Acoma and Laguna tribes offered words of wisdom and participated in a special candle blessing ceremony.
When we toured their classrooms—where multiple grade levels are taught by a single teacher—students of all ages were excited to show us their latest projects, with one first grader excitedly pointing out a green bud barely visible in the soil of the potted plant he has been tending for science class.
Trujillo described the school’s growth and success with a similarly botanic metaphor, comparing the plight of a mission diocese like Gallup to the challenges of living in a desert.
“In the desert, there’s hardly any water. For any farming that is done, we can’t just spread water any which way,” he said. “In education, there are very little resources, so we have to make do with what we have, but what we do is make the best of it.”
By all accounts, the school’s efforts are bearing incredible fruit. Eighty percent of Saint Joseph’s students graduate, go to high school and finish college. They have gone on to jobs in business, healthcare, tribal leadership, and the state legislature. One of them even came back to teach at Saint Joseph.
These success stories are emblematic of the school’s goal to empower students with a feeling of self-worth that is rooted in the Catholic faith, Trujillo said.
“We want to touch the hearts of the children to know Jesus,” he said. “That’s the mission—Jesus—and how we get the children to understand that they are loved, and from there, everything else flows.”
