Kingman’s St. Patrick School offers integrated vision

“Yeah, that’s our school,” thought St. Patrick School, Kingman, Principal Joel Arnold. It was mid-July in Lincoln, Nebraska, and he was at a national conference for the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education, which describes its mission as renewing K-12 Catholic schools by reclaiming the Church’s educational tradition for growth in faith, wisdom, and virtue. As a speaker described the characteristics of a vibrant Catholic school, Arnold couldn’t help but think it sounded a lot like his school.

“Everybody – our parents, parishioners, volunteers, students, faculty, and staff – really works together to contribute their talents,” Arnold described. “Working together, we create a symphony, where every moment is a religious one. Math, science, and reading each become a dialect in the love-language of God. I can feel that at our school: the joy of discovery and learning. I feel the support of not just our parishioners, but also the faithful departed that are watching over us.”

As the first St. Patrick principal to graduate from the school, many of those faithful departed are familiar to Arnold, he acknowledges. “This is where I grew up,” he said. “In 2030, St. Patrick Catholic School will celebrate 100 years. Kingman is a town of hard-working, salt-of-the-Earth people who are always willing to help out. Many of them have a deep interior faith, and we have to rise to the challenge of sharing that faith with the next generation.”

Integrated education

With 130 students that run from pre-K through the eighth grade, St. Patrick is small enough that Arnold knows every student, and not only their names. “I know what they want to be when they grow up,” he said. “I know every parent.”

In the 2021 school year, Arnold notes, St. Patrick Pastor Fr. Andrew Walsh set the school on its current path. “To help rediscover our heritage of Catholic education, he worked with our staff to really revamp our curriculum; he calls it the Integrated Catholic Curriculum,” Arnold said. “It focuses on the Catholic liberal arts. It has been very exciting to see it really revitalize our approach to teaching by highlighting the true, the good, and the beautiful.”

He indicates it has strengthened the school’s already strong Catholic culture. “The students in this school exhibit a joy and sense of wonder,” Arnold said. “They are curious about what they are learning. Their teachers work to cultivate that.”

Revealing the connections between academic subjects is a hallmark of integrated education, Arnold explains. “For example, history is connected directly to literature, so many of the books they read are set during the same historical period they’re studying,” he said. “We also have an amazing school librarian and have started The Crusader 100 list of books we hope every student will read before graduation. Meanwhile, our incredible technology teacher has converted her computer lab to include a STEM lab that kids visit once a week for some hands-on science time.”

Arnold goes on to note that every grade is responsible for assembling a different project during the course of a school year. When it is complete, family members are invited to the unveiling. 

“The first graders do a presentation called ‘Nursery Rhyme Time’ in which they memorize and act out nursery rhymes,” he said. “The second graders have Crusader Festival, in which they turn their classroom into a little museum about the medieval period. Fifth graders have a Native American Museum, where students have researched different tribes. All of it adds to our students’ joy and excitement of discovery.”

The innovative curriculum is also timeless, Arnold suggests, citing the holistic approach that he especially recalls experiencing as a student in the classroom of his former St. Patrick first-grade teacher Mrs. Maureen Bogner. “So many of these methods and techniques to foster curiosity and love of learning are exactly how Mrs. Bogner taught us,” he said.

Spiritual formation

Even as St. Patrick strives to incorporate the faith naturally into all parts of its curriculum, students’ religious instruction takes place under the umbrella of the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd. The school’s spiritual life also includes monthly Eucharistic adoration, in which students write in prayer journals that are not only to be kept throughout a school year, but during the student’s entire time at St. Patrick. 

“By graduation, they will have a journal that will allow them to look back through eight years of joys, answered petitions, and more,” Arnold said. “Students will be able to see how their relationships with Jesus have grown through the years. It’s a very tangible thing that helps form that relationship.”

Students of all ages also attend retreats, from the one preceding first communion to the outdoor one held for middle schoolers each year, which includes an outdoor Mass.

In normal circumstances, of course, students attend Mass three days a week in St. Patrick Church, a setting in which Arnold says he feels particularly connected with the communion of saints that has passed through the parish and school.

Arnold is not the only one with that sense. He cites the example of a former St. Patrick classmate with whom he lost touch after they graduated eighth grade. They reconnected after Arnold returned as St. Patrick principal, and the conversation took an especially reflective turn one evening when he was at the Arnold home for dinner. The friend acknowledged that his life’s journey had included some exits off the figurative highway of practicing the Catholic faith, but that he had resumed that route.

“I asked him what brought him back to the faith and he said he never forgot those people in the back pews from our days of going to daily Mass three times a week,” Arnold said. “He said, ‘I received the Eucharist all those times, and I knew those people were praying for me. I could never forget that and it ended up bringing me back.’”