January 30, 2015
Earlier this week, I sent a letter to parents and another to students letting them know that Our Lady of Good Counsel High School has launched a Global Programs initiative. As part of the initiative, this coming fall we hope to enroll twelve international students—six freshmen and six sophomores.
In some ways, we seem to be coming late to the party. Many of our peers (schools of the Archdiocese of Washington, AIMS, and the XBSS network) have had an international student program for several years. In many cases, schools have sought international students as a matter of financial necessity, especially since the Recession in 2008. Fortunately, our enrollment has been stable over that same period. International students do help with the budget, but their presence at our school is very important for other reasons. Our students need a vision of the wider world. In the past week, Good Counsel students have returned from trips to El Salvador and Spain. We have 78 students going to Italy at Easter. A trip to Belize, more than a year from now, has a waiting list of five students. We have a record number of students enrolled in the International Baccalaureate Diploma Cohort of the Class of 2016.
Our students are hungry for engagement with those parts of the world—areas that do not look like home. They would not likely describe themselves as growing in international mindedness, but that’s what it is. We live in a world where multilingualism, intercultural understanding, and global engagement are crucial elements of a complete education. If we don’t cultivate these qualities in today’s learners, it is hard to be optimistic about our ability to speak and listen to one another. Progress in addressing all the issues that dominate the evening news, like climate, scarcity of resources, wealth and poverty, conflict over territory, and respect for faith traditions, will be difficult.
It’s no surprise that Pope Francis understands the need to go global. While returning home from visiting my parents in New Zealand during the Christmas break, I arrived in San Francisco and learned that Pope Francis had announced the appointment of twenty new cardinals. One of them, Archbishop John Dew of the Archdiocese of Wellington, is from my native home. My mom calls him “Bishop John,” and she tells me how she gets a kiss on the cheek when she sees him. His appointment is not only a great honor and source of pride for the Catholic Church in New Zealand, it is also a powerful sign of the Holy Father’s truly global vision for the Church. Since he was elected, Pope Francis, himself the first Pontiff from the Southern Hemisphere, has appointed cardinals from such places as Cape Verde, Nicaragua, Burkina Faso, Myanmar, Ethiopia, and Tonga—all places that most of us would struggle to identify on a map.
As Pope Francis is doing for the Church, our hope at Our Lady of Good Counsel is to make us a better institution by deliberately raising community engagement with the rich diversity and interconnectedness of our world.
