Some parents (mostly from my parish, I think) have banded together and formed a sort of a co-op Catholic high school:
Last November, a 32- year- old attorney with the Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps at Fort Drum in New York packed up his wife Annie and their five children and their belongings and headed west to St. Paul to take on a daunting new challenge: founding headmaster of The Chesterton Academy, a private, independent high school inspired by the thought of G. K. Chesterton.
" This is ridiculous," said the new headmaster’s five- year- old daughter in true Chestertonian fashion.
The new headmaster is John DeJak, a graduate of Loyola University Chicago, where he was a recipient of the Presidential Scholarship, and a 2004 graduate of the Ave Maria School of Law in Ann Arbor. He was an easy pick for the school’s founding board of Catholic parents, led by Dale Ahlquist, president of the American Chesterton Society and an internationally recognized authority on Chesterton’s life and work.
DeJak has taught Latin, theology, Church history and ecclesiology at Catholic high schools in Chicago and Cleveland, worked as a legal intern for the St. Thomas More Society, and is an active pro-lifer, fully committed to The Chesterton Academy’s goal of building a "culture of life."
And he is a passionate devotee of Chesterton and Chesterton’s mentor, Hilaire Belloc.
Also leading the effort for the new school is Thomas Bengtson, publisher of the North- Western Financial Review and a member of the board of the Couple to Couple League and publisher of its Family Foundations magazine.
The founders of the school are in the process of settling on a permanent location for the school in the southwest Minneapolis area, and a closing date is forthcoming, DeJak told The Wanderer in a recent telephone interview. "This is a wonderful effort by parents here in the Twin Cities," DeJak said.
"As parents are the primary educators of their children, this new academy is truly an effort that comes from the heart of the Church’s teachings and what better model than G. K. Chesterton in terms of intellectual giant and culture warrior.
It’s scheduled to open this fall with ninth and tenth grades, even if it has to do so in a temporary facility, and expand to upper grades within a year. DeJak spoke to our homeschoolers’ co-op a couple of weeks ago, and I was impressed. If they manage to pull it off, it could be the perfect mix of institution and parental involvement. The curriculum is classic liberal-arts.
Here’s the nascent school’s website.
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