As the graduation season approaches, one Catholic high school in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis is ready to celebrate its first class of students who both started at the school as freshmen and will graduate this spring.
Unity Catholic High School in Burnsville was founded in 2019 and has grown to 65 students. Nine are about to graduate.
“Now that we’ve got all four grades this year … I say we’re kind of like a permanent school now; we’re no longer in the start-up phase,” said Matt Birk, former professional football player and one of the school’s founders. “Practicing Catholic” radio show host Patrick Conley recently interviewed Birk for an upcoming episode about the high school.
Birk said he “grew up in Catholic education, grade school and high school in St. Paul,” and saw some flaws in the education model — “how we educated kids, just kind of pushed a lot of information on them, want them to regurgitate it back to us.” He mentioned living in Florida and then New York and “I had all these kids of my own, and we’re moving and … touring Catholic schools, and … heard a lot about academics and achievement in college, heard a lot about sports, and heard less and less about the faith.”
The family moved back to the Twin Cities six years ago. Birk said he “had this on my heart that I want to start a school.”
He said he wanted it to be vigorously Catholic but not “just aim to get kids into college.”
“I really want it to prepare kids for life and, ultimately, prepare kids for eternity because … most of them will go to college, but they’re all going to have to function in society at some point,” he said. “And every single one of them are going to stand before God.”
Asked how Unity serves its mission to prepare students for life and eternity, Birk said that first, “the Catholic faith offers a good framework for a great life,” offering a relationship with God and others, “striving for virtue, and character, service” and joy.
Second, the school offers “Real World Wednesdays” where traditional academic classes are set aside. Instead, students are taught “very practical things like cooking, sewing, personal finance,” he said. “And then we have other classes that talk about character, leadership,” Birk said.
“We want to teach differently,” Birk said. “We want it to be very experiential, very hands on in some of these subjects, but really getting kids ready for ‘the real world.’”
Birk said the school’s founders have demonstrated that a group of parents can start a school that doesn’t have to look like “the legacy schools or traditional schools.”
“It can look different, it can be different,” he said. “You can stress different things. I think that’s what the world needs. I think that’s what our kids need. We need different types of schools for different types of kids.”
To learn more about Unity Catholic High School, and to hear Birk describe how his vision of starting a school became a reality, listen to this episode of “Practicing Catholic,” which debuts at 9 p.m. May 12 on Relevant Radio 1330 AM and repeats at 1 p.m. May 13 and 2 p.m. May 14.
Produced by Relevant Radio and the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, the latest show also includes an interview with Father Jake Anderson from the Newman Center at the University of Minnesota, and Dave Hrbacek, photographer and reporter for The Catholic Spirit, who discuss fishing, hunting and spending time in the great outdoors; and Mary Healy, professor of sacred Scripture at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, who previews the May 20 Activated Disciple Seminar in Minneapolis and how the faithful are called to be disciples.
Listen to interviews after they have aired at PracticingCatholicShow.com or choose a streaming platform at anchor.fm/practicing-catholic-show.
