CBS’ “60 minutes,”<\/a> the Cristo Rey style of education has been gaining momentum ever since Father John Foley started the program in Chicago with the first school building in 1996 under the Jesuit Religious Order of Priests (the North Miami campus is a Catholic school).<\/p>\n“There was a poor neighborhood in Chicago with a dropout rate of about 75 percent,” Rivas-Vazquez explained. “The Jesuits wanted to help families (in poverty) and establish a high school to prepare them for college. Instead of outright philanthropy, they offered jobs.”<\/p>\n
As Father Foley explained to the “60 Minutes” crew, tuition back then was about $9,000.<\/p>\n
“So, we knocked on doors and said, ‘Would you give us a job? Would you hire a student?’ … and when we got back,” Foley said, they had way too many “yes” answers and enough to launch the program.<\/p>\n
Today, the estimated $12,000 tuition is about four-fifths covered by the work-study program’s corporate sponsors, allowing the under-served with college aspirations to launch their dreams.<\/p>\n
“What initially (was designed) as a financial solution has become a distinguishing characteristic (work-study) of our school,” Rivas-Vazquez said.<\/p>\n
![\"IMG_1325.jpeg\"](\"data:image\/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAQAAAADCAQAAAAe\/WZNAAAAEElEQVR42mM8U88ABowYDABAxQPltt5zqAAAAABJRU5ErkJggg==\")
<\/p>\n
Students meeting with KBCF’s Andrew Britton.<\/p>\n
There are even dual-enrollment opportunities and families pay between $50 and $180 a month for tuition, \u201cdepending on capacity to pay,\u201d she said. \u201cAll of our families are below the federal poverty line.\u201d<\/p>\n
The pre-ninth grade “boot camp” at Cristo Rey (Christ the King) schools teaches the necessities, such as hygiene, how to dress, shake hands properly, how to use Microsoft or Excel, and even how to use a phone with a cord.<\/p>\n
“Because some of them will be working with law firms, they have to know confidentiality laws and, likewise with hospitals, the HIPAA laws,” Rivas-Vazquez said.<\/p>\n
There is no manual labor involved. Much of it is filing and data entry, or specific skills, but the important part is getting the student acclimated early to the real-world personal interaction with bosses or the public. Each business has a rotation of a four-student team, so a different student fills Friday’s full-day roles.<\/p>\n
“We have students working at a travel agency, for example, helping with the website (because that might be their strengths and the business’ biggest need) and that exposes them to workplaces and careers they might not know about but maybe heard about,” Rivas-Vazquez said.<\/p>\n
Cristo Rey tries to pair the student up with an occupation they might be interested in, such as health care.<\/p>\n
Accounting firms, construction companies, major law firms in Brickell and Coconut Grove, and Mercy Hospital are just some of the corporate partners that employ the students all four years, and some of those students will be invited back to those companies for “real pay” during the summer of their college years.<\/p>\n
“It shouldn’t amaze us what they learn being in these professional environments,” Rivas-Vazquez said. “Some of these jobs might have been aspirational to them at one time, but they learn so much.”<\/p>\n
Cristo Rey provides the transportation each workday, which starts with a hearty breakfast at the school. It’s also crucial that each student (about 300 currently at the North Miami campus) excels in academics, and there’s extracurricular activities, such as basketball, flag football, soccer, volleyball and cheer available.<\/p>\n
Britton said he has one intern at KBCF who has been contemplating a switch to a public school, where several of her friends are, but he offered his advice. “I told her, ‘Take a step back and see what you will be missing.’<\/p>\n
“She is in a school with a direct pipeline to college success,” he said. “By the time you get to college, you’re better prepared than other kids, and that’s a privilege … they’re getting a chance of a lifetime.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Students at Cristo Rey Miami High really get down to business in a curriculum led by the motto:…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":419098,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[165668,165669,113,225,227,226,165667,7338,165670,165671,3384,61603],"class_list":["post-419097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-hialeah","tag-cristo-rey","tag-cristo-rey-miami-high","tag-education","tag-hialeah","tag-hialeah-headlines","tag-hialeah-news","tag-key-bisayne","tag-north-miami","tag-school-working","tag-schools-in-miami","tag-students","tag-working"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=419097"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419097\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/419098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=419097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=419097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=419097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}