Gates grant will help expand model high school program

Wednesday, May 21, 2003

By MATTHEW CRAFT
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Cristo Rey Jesuit High School serves a Chicago neighborhood where youths routinely drop out of public schools.

But at Cristo Rey, where class sizes are kept small and students are teamed up with local employers, more than 80 percent graduate.

That success drew the attention of the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Today, the foundation will announce that it has joined with the Cassin Educational Initiative Foundation, based in Newton, Mass., to donate almost $19 million to expand the Cristo Rey program in cities around the country.

"Two things attracted us to this model," said Tom Vander Ark, the Gates foundation's director of education. "First, it works."

"The second reason," Vander Ark said, is that the Gates foundation wants to see low-income families have a variety of good schools to choose from.

Cristo Rey students work five days a month at local businesses. Their income goes to the school, which uses it to cover its costs and allows it to offer more reasonable tuition.

The grant will be used to establish 12 new schools modeled on Cristo Rey and expand the rolls at existing ones, such as De La Salle North Catholic High School in Portland, Ore.

New schools are planned or under study in Colorado, New York, Massachusetts, Ohio, Arizona, Illinois, North Carolina, New Jersey and Delaware.

With an endowment of about $24 billion, the Gates foundation awards grants to public and private programs with a focus on global health, education, libraries and those working in the Pacific Northwest.

It's one of the world's leaders in funding the search for a malaria vaccine, and it has given more than $600 million to organizations fighting the spread of AIDS and tuberculosis.

Earlier this month, it announced a matching $2 million grant to the Seattle Girls' School, a Central Area school to promote leadership, mathematics and science skills among middle school students.

In April, the foundation gave $70 million to the University of Washington to help build a facility for the study of the human genetic code.

P-I reporter Matthew Craft can be reached at 206-448-8003 or matthewcraft@seattlepi.com