In a Feb. 13 presentation to staff at the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, Jason Slattery, the director of Catholic education and superintendent of schools, noted that in the five years since the COVID-19 pandemic, enrollment in the archdiocese’s school system grew over 9%.
“(It) continues to chug along, despite a low birth rate in the state of Minnesota,” Slattery said. “When we’re focusing at the pre-K level to see that there’s still a lot of growth there, (it) gives us a great hope for the future.”
The annual report revealed an average 89% retention rate for elementary and high schools in the archdiocese, and 47% of eighth-grade Catholic school graduates enroll in a Catholic high school.
As a reflection of faith formation, 86% of schools in the archdiocese offer Eucharistic adoration during the year and 96% of grade schools have weekly Mass.
Slattery also emphasized the beauty of having a diverse array of school sizes in the archdiocese. There are 76 Catholic elementary schools (preschool to 8th grade) and 16 Catholic high schools in the archdiocese.
“We have rural schools, we have urban schools, we have suburban schools, we have schools of 1,000 (students) and we have schools of closer to 40 (students). All of those families, all of those kids, want this thing that the Church is offering, this Catholic education.”
When compared to Minnesota state schools, students attending Catholic school had higher participation in the ACT with a higher average composite score, according to the report.
Lumen Accreditation
The 2024-2025 annual report on Catholic education in the archdiocese, released by the Office for the Mission of Catholic Education (OMCE) in January, also described the benefits of accreditation from Lumen Accreditation offered through The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.
In a letter from Archbishop Bernard Hebda and Slattery that was published in the annual report, they recalled that in September of 2024, experts from Lumen Accreditation visited the archdiocese to grant accreditation to all Catholic schools.
Lumen Accreditation provides a framework of principles to which K-12 Catholic schools can align their mission and identity.
For Holy Family Catholic High School in Victoria, school president Michael Brennan told The Catholic Spirit in an email that Lumen Accreditation is a badge of honor. The distinction of being a Lumen Accredited school provides Holy Family with a level of credibility and distinctiveness in the education offered, Brennan wrote.
“It can be a challenge at times to see the forest from the trees,” Brennan wrote. “Through real-time observations, thorough data collection, and interviews with various stakeholder groups, the visiting team, as a result of their immersive and exhaustive process, is able to offer school leaders a fresh and objective perspective. The results can be a reorientation of focus, the identification of blind spots, or opportunities to leverage current successful practices. But as valuable as these outputs may be, the real gift of the accreditation process is the self-reflection it both demands and inspires –– something that is absolutely necessary for growth.”
During the presentation, Slattery said OMCE sought systems-level accreditation from outside the archdiocese. The accreditation validates work already done by the archdiocese through OMCE’s Catholic School Study, a quality assurance process that launched in 2022.
“It (the Catholic School Study) is one of the primary activities of our office to go out and to visit Catholic schools and to really assess them for operational health, to really acknowledge what really is going well and to reflect with the school on what things could be done better,” Slattery said. “We’re committed to do this for every school at least once every five years. And it’s through that process of our staff going out that the accreditation for the school flows. … This is a highly staff-intensive activity, but it’s probably one of the most effective things that we can do is to spend time in the schools with our folks.”
Alison Dahlman, associate director of educational quality and excellence for OMCE, said that the Catholic School Study ensures that Catholic schools are providing high quality Catholic education.
Quality is measured by the study’s Nine Principles of Excellence, Dahlman said: academic achievement and integration; virtue formation and human development; spiritual life; apostolic discernment; unity with the archdiocese and parishes; effective governance, leadership and teaching; access; partnership engagement; and financial sustainability.
The Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis is the first diocese in the United States to receive this accreditation, Dahlman said.
“It’s not all that common on the educational landscape that organizations like ours are maybe looking for an outside body to tell them things they are doing well and maybe the things they (could do) better,” Slattery told archdiocesan staff. “We often can exist in some level of insulation, but we really wanted some way to really help craft that narrative and to help look over our efforts.”
According to the annual report, a team of experts from Lumen Accreditation met with OMCE and conducted a total of 184 interviews and visited six K-12 Catholic schools in the archdiocese. The team recognized OMCE for its support and partnership with Catholic school faculty, its professional development and formation and its two-way communication.
“(The) observation of the visiting team,” Slattery said, “(was) that the Office (for the Mission of Catholic Education) fosters strong relationships with Catholic school leaders throughout the archdiocese, and that these relationships are foundational to the work of the office as it operates and brings excellent programs, resources and support to Catholic schools. Like other archdiocesan staff in their fields of ministry, the heart of OMCE’s efforts in its field has been to build strong relationships with Catholic school personnel,” Slattery said.
The team also recommended goals to work toward, including establishing formal training for clergy and school leaders and exploring additional funding, Slattery said.
The accreditation process, Brennan wrote, provides a space for reflection and meaningful dialogue that inspires clarity and defines a school’s practices and planning.
“Catholic education is the synthesis of knowledge and truth,” Brennan wrote. “Without the latter, any form of education is simply incomplete.”
A 2025-2026 Catholic High School Guide is now available for parents as they guide their children to a high school education.
Created by the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis’s Office for the Mission of Catholic Education, the guide provides information from the 16 Catholic high schools in the archdiocese on enrollment, founding years, faith, academics, extra-curricular activities, annual financial aid given, college credit courses, average ACT scores and annual student service hours.
The guide also includes an interactive map of the Twin Cities area to help parents locate each school.
