Mia Solorsano is a senior at St. John Paul II Catholic High School in Avondale, Ariz. Her high school did not exist before she was a teenager.
Ms. Solorsano grew up in the West Valley, one of the fastest-growing areas of the Phoenix metropolitan area. Phoenix is the fastest-growing major city in the United States, surpassing Philadelphia as the fifth largest city in the nation in the latest census. Leaders of the Diocese of Phoenix foresaw this growth and opened the Catholic high school to serve the area in 2017. Run by Dominican sisters, the school enrolls about 330 students and could reach 400 next year.
It comes as no surprise to residents, but about 70 percent of the school’s students are Latino—well above the 17.4 percent of students who are Latino in Catholic schools across the nation as a whole, according to the National Catholic Education Association.
About 70 percent of the school’s students are Latino—well above the 17.4 percent of students who are Latino in Catholic schools across the nation as a whole.
Experts estimate that the majority of Catholics under 18 are Latino, like Ms. Solorsano, and more than a third of the teachers at John Paul II are Latino.
“It helps,” Ms. Solorsano said of the Latino faculty. “Being able to have a teacher who is Hispanic, so she understands my culture, and Catholic, so she understands my faith—the teacher understands where I’m coming from.”
While she was raised Catholic, Ms. Solorsano said it started becoming more important to her in seventh and eighth grade, thanks in part to the youth program at nearby St. John Vianney Church in Goodyear, a suburb of Phoenix. There, she met Stephanie Salinas, who was a youth minister and the director of religious education at the parish, and who now teaches digital media, speech and digital photography at John Paul II.
“I love working with high schoolers,” Ms. Salinas said. “But having a predominantly Hispanic community that now makes up the majority of the student body here, I want to be part of it. I’m a Hispanic young adult from this area. So I feel like students relate to me in that way.”
A student once told her, “Ms. Salinas, we finally have a young Hispanic teacher that is from here.” For her, that meant a lot.
A student once told her, “Ms. Salinas, we finally have a young Hispanic teacher that is from here.” For her, that meant a lot.
“I thought that was really cool, because yeah, you can make something out of yourself even if you’re from the West Valley,” she told America. “I’m not different. I have the same resources that they have. And they can choose what they want to do. I can be that bridge for them.”
At lunch, students often gather in her classroom, where they work on projects and chat with her.
“My parents are immigrants, so when I was applying to college, I had to figure it out on my own,” said Ms. Salinas, who moved to the West Valley from California with her family when she was 15. “I tell [the students] I can help them. A lot of times our parents don’t have the knowledge of how to get financial aid and scholarships, what deadlines look like or even the information they need to provide for forms. Those conversations have nothing to do with graphic design or speech, but it’s important to relate to them.”
Ms. Salinas said her faith is important to her as well, and she incorporates it into her lesson planning. She said cultural devotions and traditions help capture the essence of Catholicism. But at the same time, she said, the reasons behind the traditions were not always explained to her when she was a child.
“For these young people, when they see their teachers living out their faith, it’s not like, ‘This is just what my parents are telling me to do,’” Ms. Salinas said.
“For these young people, when they see their teachers living out their faith, it’s not like, ‘This is just what my parents are telling me to do,’” Ms. Salinas said. “There’s beauty, there’s truth, there’s goodness that people are attracted to. So they start to understand this is something they can make their own, too.”
Making their faith “their own” is a key aspect of John Paul II’s ethics program. Ross Helland, the assistant principal of academics, believes the school’s ethics program sets it apart from other schools. That includes semesters spent studying the dignity of the human person, principles of ethics and bioethics, as well as a service component. In their senior year, students read from The Pope and the CEO, a book written by Andreas Widmer, who was part of the Swiss Guard during St. John Paul II’s pontificate.
“If a student is being told, ‘You have to believe this,’ they’re going to revolt against it,” Mr. Helland said. “We want our students to have a true, authentic belief in what it is that we’re teaching. We don’t want to force it. We want them to actually come to that belief on their own.”
The ethics class is a student favorite, he said, because students are given the freedom to think. He also noted the community attends Mass each week at St. Thomas Aquinas Church next door and regularly spends time in adoration on campus.
“We want our students to have a true, authentic belief in what it is that we’re teaching. We don’t want to force it.”
Mr. Helland explained that nearly all of the students at John Paul II receive some form of financial help. Administrators make a point of helping families with financial aid applications and offer help in English and Spanish.
“There’s a misconception of barriers [to Catholic education], and it comes from lack of knowledge,” said Ms. Salinas, who has a child enrolled in a nearby parochial school. “Someone thinks of Catholic education and says: ‘Expensive. Can’t afford it. Not for me. Not our demographic.’ But the majority of our students here are blessed to have scholarships and grants and financial assistance.”
School administrators, she said, have made it a point to welcome Latino students. The Dominican sisters began teaching at St. John Vianney’s parochial school, which is mostly Latino, while the high school was being built.
Matthew Gonzales, John Paul II’s director of admissions and marketing and a West Valley native, said he loves finding a way to enroll students from families who did not think it was possible.
“When [immigrants] come here, they don’t realize they can get a Catholic education for their children,” he said. His wife, who was born in Mexico, grew up thinking Catholic education was only available to the wealthy.
“Someone thinks of Catholic education and says: ‘Expensive. Can’t afford it. Not for me. Not our demographic.’’’
“When we say Latino or Hispanic, it encompasses a whole group in which there is a lot of diversity,” Mr. Gonzales said. That diversity includes first-, second- and third-generation immigrants, and families that are a mixture of backgrounds, he said. Some families mostly speak Spanish at home, and others speak mostly English.
Mr. Gonzales, a father of six, did not attend Catholic school as a child. But he and his wife have made a point of enrolling their children.
His parents did not read to him as a child, he said, and he was raised mostly by his grandparents. But his grandparents were not able to help him with his homework, both because of the language barrier and because of their education. His grandfather worked the cotton fields in the area. His mother spent time in jail.
“I saw that growing up, and I knew that I didn’t want that for my family,” Mr. Gonzales said, adding that his mother did work hard to help him on his journey to college. “I want my kids to grow up knowing Jesus Christ, to know that they are loved and to go out and love others. When they’re in Catholic education, I can see that happening.”
“When [immigrants] come here, they don’t realize they can get a Catholic education for their children,” Mr. Gonzales said.
He remembers his 5-year-old coming home from school one day and wanting to lead prayer for the family. Mr. Gonzales said he was raised Catholic but did not fully come to believe until he was in college.
“That’s when I really understood that the Eucharist was truly the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ,” he said. “It wasn’t until that moment that I fell in love with Jesus for who he was.”
That faith is something faculty and staff at John Paul II share, and a faith they hope to foster among the students. According to Ms. Salinas, the students are “not settling for the stereotype” of what their lives should be, given their humble means. “They are applying themselves and always wanting to be better.”
Ms. Solorsano, who will graduate this spring, is a good example. She was a finalist for QuestBridge, a nonprofit that connects high-achieving, low-income high school students with selective colleges, and has applied to numerous universities, including Creighton University and the University of Notre Dame. So far, she said, she has been accepted to Notre Dame. She aspires to be a neurosurgeon.
“I’ve known what I wanted my career to be since seventh grade,” she said. “Coming to JPII, I’ve been able to fine-tune it to know exactly what I want, what I need to do in order to be able to pursue and achieve that career in the future.”
Correction: In a previous version of this story, Mia Solorsano’s last name was misspelled.
