Ascension Catholic Academy is excited to announce that two of its schools have been accepted into the University of Notre Dame’s Higher-Powered Learning Program, a three-year program leading school teams through the implementation of excellent and sustainable blended-learning programs. Thanks to the generosity of the GHR Foundation, Notre Dame’s Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) will welcome five Catholic schools from the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis into the Higher-Powered Learning Program this year, including Ascension Catholic School and St. John Paul II Catholic School. Ascension and St. John Paul II are members of Ascension Catholic Academy. The other three schools are St. Alphonsus Catholic School, Community of Saints Regional Catholic School, and Nativity of Mary School.
The Higher-Powered Learning Program builds on the success of ACE’s blended-learning implementations in Notre Dame ACE Academies in the Archdiocese of Indianapolis. Blended learning is a form of education in which teachers use adaptive, online learning programs and the rich data from them to personalize each student’s path to mastery. Since 2016, ACE’s Higher-Powered Learning team has led three schools through similar programs that have resulted in outstanding academic and personal growth for many of the Archdiocese’s most underserved students.
To help ACE expand its exciting work, the GHR Foundation–a Minneapolis-based philanthropic organization– awarded ACE a grant of $1.8 million over three-and-a-half years to implement blended-learning programs in Catholic schools in the Twin Cities. This generous gift will allow ACE will launch its Higher-Powered Learning Program and will also support the majority of the schools’ costs to participate in the program, including infrastructure upgrades and technology implementation.
“GHR’s gift is an investment not only in ACE and the strengthening of Catholic education, but also in the expansion of a transformative way of teaching and learning to an amazing community,” said Rev. Nate Wills, C.S.C, an ACE faculty member and director of the Higher-Powered Learning Program. “We are thrilled to partner with GHR and these five outstanding schools in our quest to ensure that every child has the education he or she deserves as a unique child of God.”