Editor’s note: This article was originally published by the Office for the Mission of Catholic Education within the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.
Clad like his classmates in a paint-splotched apron protecting his black Cretin-Derham Hall polo shirt, Jono Krummen carefully dabbed royal blue paint on a canvas last spring as he worked on a portrait of his dog, Pearl, a mini goldendoodle.
Painting, he explained, is exciting and makes him feel happy.
That is true for much of Krummen’s freshman experience: playing tuba in band, participating in JROTC, swimming on the school’s team and working with micro:bits in science, his favorite subject. He showed off photos of a physics project with weight-supporting structures built of dry spaghetti noodles and marshmallows, and of himself tentatively reaching towards a Van de Graaff generator — the metallic orb designed to deliver an electric shock.
Now a rising sophomore, Krummen and his classmate Alex Thorton are also CDH’s first students with Down syndrome, pioneers in a new program called Common Ground. Its founder, CDH Learning Specialist and Common Ground Director Joe Miley, read about a similar program in a Jesuit high school in St. Louis and wanted to emulate it, especially when Krummen’s parents inquired about enrolling their son in the St. Paul Catholic high school.
Catholic school leaders in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis are hoping likeminded efforts to integrate students with disabilities can be achieved across its 89 Catholic elementary and high schools, which enroll more than 30,000 students, and are taking key steps toward this goal.
‘Deep pastoral concern’
Expanding local Catholic schools’ inclusion of children with disabilities “has been an area of deep pastoral concern for the archdiocese,” said Jason Slattery, the archdiocese’s director of Catholic education and superintendent of schools.
The hope is for schools to be in a “better position to accompany families with special needs,” he said, “and to really help ensure that our institutions are better equipped, and open and welcoming environments for all students whose parents are seeking a Catholic education.”
Slattery and other education leaders emphasize that this effort is rooted in the Church’s understanding of the dignity of the child, the purpose of Catholic education, its ministry to families, and a Catholic pro-life witness that affirms and partners with parents raising children with special needs.
As a key step toward the archdiocese’s goal, in April, its Office for the Mission of Catholic Education (OMCE), which Slattery leads, launched the Archdiocesan Commission on Students with Special Needs in Catholic Education. The 17-member commission has a directive to make practical recommendations to Archbishop Bernard Hebda this fall in four strategic areas: parent support and involvement; programmatic needs; professional development; and cultivating school leadership and clergy support.
Members range from parents of children with disabilities to clergy, learning experts and school leaders, including Miley, with experience serving students with a range of learning needs. Their first meeting was April 30 at the Archdiocesan Catholic Center in St. Paul.
‘This is who we are as Catholics’
Commission member Beth Lasseter is deeply committed to the effort, both as a teacher and the parent of a child diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder who has struggled in various learning environments, including Catholic and public schools.
Her family’s journey, including the heart-wrenching situation of being asked to leave a Catholic school her son attended, led Lasseter to become certified in special education through the University of Notre Dame’s Alliance for Catholic Education’s Program for Inclusive Education, or PIE. Her first connection with PIE at a 2022 conference “blew me away,” she said.
“I heard stories from educators and researchers and experts and other people like me who saw this problem of kids who were just falling through the cracks in Catholic schools, and who were feeling like they didn’t belong and had needs that should be met,” she said. “I probably went through three boxes of tissues in two days, just with the amount of crying — not just because of the pain we’d gone through, but also tears of joy that this is actually possible in Catholic schools.”
The mother of five has since encountered examples of all kinds of Catholic schools across the U.S. that have successfully embraced enrolling students with disabilities, including small and low-resourced schools that recognize it is part of their mission.
“This is who we are as Catholics,” said Lasseter, who teaches middle school religion at Providence Academy in Plymouth. “We don’t have a legal mandate to do this. We have a Gospel mandate. We have Christ’s words himself, who said that ‘whatever you do for the least of my brethren, you do for me.’ We have the resources in the rich tradition of the Church and the preferential option for the poor and the marginalized. This is our call.”
Parent-inspired initiative
The commission’s first meeting followed OMCE’s annual convocation for Catholic school leaders April 4, during which OMCE leaders shared their vision for the effort and why Archbishop Hebda is prioritizing it.
The need emerged both from school leaders’ conversations with parents and pastors, and from Archbishop Hebda’s 2022 pastoral letter “You Will Be My Witnesses,” which called for the creation of a Blue Ribbon Commission focused on “Parents as Primary Educators.”
Leading this effort are OMCE Associate Directors Megan Forgette and Gayle Stoffel, who bring both professional expertise and personal passion to the commission’s work. Forgette has worked with students with special needs over her 13 years as a public school psychologist, and her son with special learning needs attends St. Joseph Catholic School in West St. Paul. Stoffel comes from a family of educators with connections to special needs education, and she is deeply involved in a Catholic nonprofit that serves disabled children in Jamaica.
In the OMCE, Forgette helps Catholic schools access funding and services to which their students are legally entitled through their local public school districts. She said many families with children with disabilities feel like they must choose between having special services their child can obtain at a public school, and the faith-based education they desire from a Catholic school.
While local Catholic schools have done important work in recent years to leverage resources to serve their students, there is still a gap, Forgette said. The commission’s work, she said, is identifying the missing “pieces of the puzzle to really create that full inclusive environment in our Catholic schools.” That includes exploring the considerable challenges around funding, professional development, staffing, curriculum, accessibility and culture change.
And, Forgette told educators April 4, there are many local Catholic schools that are already doing commendable work in disabilities inclusion.
“We’ve seen so many unique, and good and beautiful ways that schools across our system are meeting different needs,” she said, “and so we also, at the same time, want to support and grow those efforts to make sure that we are setting all of you up as best we can to grow in who you are serving.”
Inclusion vision casts wide net
While OMCE’s leaders speak of students with “special” or “unique needs,” they emphasize these efforts address a range of students, not only those who have received diagnoses, meet a special education category or have Individualized Education Program directives. Their broad efforts aim to address — and are not limited to — developmental, physical, sensory processing, emotional, behavioral, medical conditions, and speech and language needs, they said.
And expanding supports for disabilities and learning differences would benefit not only the students who experience a real or perceived barrier to attending Catholic schools, but also current students who would flourish with specialized help.
“What we’re really talking about is looking at the student in their school setting, and what … they need to be able to access the general education — our Catholic school classrooms with their peers — and what do they need to progress in their learning,” Forgette told educators April 4. “The whole goal is to make progress in widening who we are able to support in our Catholic schools.”
That message resonated with Sandy Kane, principal of St. Odilia School in Shoreview, which serves students in preschool to eighth grade. She previously was principal of Holy Spirit Catholic School in St. Paul while Jono Krummen attended middle school there. Kane saw firsthand how a school community could create a community of belonging for a student with Down syndrome.
“I was so proud of all the teachers and staff who worked with Jono, along with all the students who embraced him and helped him grow,” she said.
“The joy he brought to the entire community and the joy that we brought to him was life-giving for me and everybody else at that school, including his parents and his family, and to see there was a way to make it work for him to be in a traditional classroom, receiving a Catholic education all day, every week, just really touched my heart in a way that nothing else I’ve ever done in education has touched me,” Kane said. “So, how do we get to a place where no matter what the need is, we can serve it?”
As it explores that question, OMCE is leveraging the experience of schools in the archdiocese with proven success in disabilities inclusion, including St. John Catholic School in Little Canada and nearby Hill-Murray School, a Catholic middle and high school in Maplewood. Commission members include St. John Principal Dan Hurley and Sara Johnson, Hill-Murray’s director of literacy.
‘Everyone needs to belong’
Like other educators, Hurley said his school staff noted an uptick in their students’ needs in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We just started to realize that one size does not fit all,” he said. “We started tailoring plans that meet the needs and strengths of students, especially students with learning disabilities.”
School faculty adopted and created programs to meet those needs, particularly around reading and literacy. The school secured grants to hire specialty tutors and sought professional development for its staff, which was key, Hurley said.
“I had to really invest in training for all of the teachers here, so they could understand and support these diverse learners, because otherwise it wouldn’t have worked,” he said. “Our service and calling at St. John’s is to serve every single kid, no matter what their learning style is.”
Some of St. John’s graduates go on to Hill-Murray, which in 2012 opened The Nicholas Center, a physical hub for learning assistance and counseling, and a network of resources that school leaders say supports and enhances its full student body.
“Everyone needs to belong, and we need to welcome them,” said Melissa Dan, Hill-Murray’s president. “That can be more complicated in certain ways. But you look at what the Church teaches about kids with special needs or who learn differently, and everyone contributes to our community in some way.”
The school’s staff see The Nicholas Center — named for St. Nicholas, the patron saint of children — as a reflection of Hill-Murray’s Benedictine values. “The idea behind The Nicholas Center is not just the idea that it’s helping neurodiverse kids,” said Brent Johnson, the center’s director. “It’s making sure that a Catholic school can help a whole family.”
The school’s approach is to see a student, not a student with special needs, he said. “When we accept a student, we do look at where they may have some learning differences, but overall we say this is a normal child, just like everybody else. So there shouldn’t be too much of a reason that we exclude this child because of this diagnosis. We need to work with best practices and instruction to reach that child.”
And sometimes that child’s special learning needs are not due to a diagnosis, but changes or stressors in his or her life, such as divorce or serious illness, Johnson noted, which is why The Nicholas Center’s learning philosophy permeates the whole school.
While looking to local success stories, commission leaders and members are also drawing on the expertise of other dioceses where schools have advanced disabilities inclusion, as well as from organizations and institutions that specialize in this area, such as the University of Notre Dame’s Program for Inclusive Education and Saint Louis University’s Herrmann Center for Innovative Catholic Education.
Creativity and conviction
According to the National Catholic Educational Association’s annual report for 2024-2025, about 75% of U.S. Catholic schools report serving students with disabilities. Meanwhile, Catholic school inclusion of students with disabilities is on the rise nationally, with the percentage of their students with diagnosed disabilities rising to 9.1% from 7.8% in 2023-2024.
While important strides toward disability inclusion are being made in Catholic education nationwide, national experts say more work is needed broadly, including in the fundamental recognition that serving students with disabilities is at the core of Catholic education’s Christ-centered mission.
“All students bring God-given dignity and innate gifts,” Slattery said. Meanwhile, “not every student who comes to school has ever had the same levels of ability.”
That Catholic schools create an atmosphere where students with disabilities feel they belong not only recognizes those students’ dignity, but also witnesses to the Church’s pro-life worldview, which is often countercultural, he said.
That vision resonates with the Krummens, Catholics who had hoped to enroll Jono as a kindergartner in a faith-based school like his older siblings, but could not find any that would accept him. When looking at middle school, a friend suggested the Krummens consider Holy Spirit, a school Jill Krummen, Jono’s mom, was surprised to realize she had overlooked when searching for a kindergarten. The school welcomed Jono, and he had a wonderful experience — one that ultimately opened the door to his attending Cretin-Derham Hall.
“I see all the steps God put in place to get to the moment Jono started school at CDH, and it is pretty impressive,” she said.
“I’ve got to give Holy Spirit credit and immense gratitude, because they’re a small school and didn’t add staff,” she added. “They were creative, and they worked within the framework that they already had. They never made excuses. He had a lovely time there. He loved it.”
Krummen remembers looking across Holy Spirit’s parking lot at CDH’s campus and now thinks of Holy Spirit’s work paving the way for Common Ground. “When it came time to look at high school it was not easy to once again become vulnerable and ask a school we knew didn’t currently have a program in place,” she said. “Knowing there were friends and teachers connecting the schools gave us the energy and confidence to ask.”
Holy Spirit’s approach stemmed from the school’s conviction “that Jono is a child of God, Jono deserves to be at Holy Spirit” and an attitude of “we’ll make this work, he can be part of this family,” she said. “And it came from the leadership … through the teachers, and then the kids catch it.”
That conviction is now evident at CDH, which takes the approach of “do what you can, not what you can’t,” Miley said, at a pace that makes sense for the school and the expectations of Common Ground students’ families.
He attributes the initiative’s early success to learning from other schools, strong partnerships with the students’ parents, and having a dedicated learning specialist and peer mentors to support and encourage the students in their classes and activities.
“More than anything, what CDH has been able to bring them (Jono and Alex) is a community that has totally welcomed them in as their own, just accepted them into the environment, loves them, is excited to have them around,” Miley said. “Just a place for them to feel like they belong, and a place to challenge them to keep on growing and don’t set limits, and see where you can get by the time your four years here are over.”
Catholic school ‘the best mode of education’
At the commission’s inaugural meeting, parent-members shared stories, sometimes with tears, of their challenges to find a Catholic school where their child could flourish or even feel welcome. Several of them had been told their child would be better served at a public school, which are perceived as having more funding and resources for children with disabilities.
That response — although common — is backward, Catholic school leaders were told at their April 4 convocation.
“We know and believe that Catholic school is the best mode of education, and that Catholic school is the only place where education can be done as it’s truly meant to be done,” said J.D. Flynn, a Catholic journalist, canon lawyer and father of three, two of whom have Down syndrome. “The only place where our children belonged, as far as we were concerned, was in the Catholic school, to be educated for the whole of their life and for their eternal life.”
As the keynote speaker for that event, he shared stories from his own family’s journey with Catholic education and his work with the Denver affiliate of the FIRE Foundation, which provides educational resources and fundraising for disabilities inclusion in Catholic schools.
When people witnessed the positive effects of including students with disabilities, and especially the students’ friendships, “more school leaders wanted that, and more donors wanted to support that,” Flynn said.
In May, Forgette and Stoffel attended a conference organized by St. Louis University’s Herrmann Center for Innovative Catholic Education, led by the nationally respected education inclusion expert Dr. Michael Boyle.
“It was really eye opening to see how what we were doing in our local Church is ultimately going to be helping guide and lead some of these other dioceses across the country,” said Forgette, who sees a role for the archdiocese to become a national leader in inclusive Catholic education.
As the commission continues its work over the summer, she emphasized that its members’ efforts are meant to start the conversation, and the OMCE is committed to continuing their work over the long term.
“This is a starting point,” Forgette said. “It’s not an ending point for us.”
Wiering is senior writer for OSV News.
