Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
OCA conducts ribbon cutting
Catholic high school opens its doors in Tontitown
TONTITOWN — Students, faculty and community members came together Thursday to celebrate the long-awaited opening of Northwest Arkansas’ only Catholic high school.
Ozark Catholic Academy, which leases space inside the Father Bandini Education Center at St. Joseph Catholic Church, opened with 16 freshmen and eight sophomores. The school plans to build toward becoming a full high school, grades nine through 12, over the next two years.
Mark Breden, president of the school’s board, welcomed a crowd gathered outside the school for a ribbon-cutting ceremony Thursday. He called the school’s opening the result of a lot of work that started more than four years ago.
“Northwest Arkansas used to be the No. 1 metropolitan area in the United States without a Catholic high school,” Breden told the crowd. “Effective today, we are no longer on that list.”
Breden praised and congratulated the students for having the courage to try a brand new school.
One of those students — the last one to enroll — is coming from Paris, a drive of more than 90 minutes away, according to John Rocha, founding head of school. The school is trying to set up the student with a host family in the area she could stay with a few days a week, Rocha said.
The school set 12 as the minimum number of students it needed to open. It ended up with 24. All but two of the students are Catholic, Rocha said.
Six of the students are Hispanic and five students would qualify for free meals in a public school system.
“So we’re trying to reach a broad spectrum of students,” Rocha said.
Those attending Thursday’s ribbon cutting included sisters Ashley Menendez and Adriana Stacey, both of Fayetteville, who launched the campaign to open a Catholic high school. The El Dorado natives moved to Northwest Arkansas with their families within the last eight years. They had wondered why there wasn’t a Catholic high school in the area.
“I started asking around,” Stacey said. “We couldn’t get a straight answer.”
They formed a proposal and a nonprofit organization in 2014. They conducted surveys and eventually zeroed in on some land in Springdale they thought would be ideal for a school.
They later switched gears and decided to focus on hiring a head of school. They reached out to the Catholic community seeking 100 families willing to donate $2,500 each. They reached their fundraising goal in a month, Stacey said.
“It was really the whole community coming together and saying, ‘We want this for our kids,’” Stacey said.
Rocha was announced as head of school in August 2016. He came from Western Academy, an all-boys Catholic school he was involved in establishing in Houston.
Many people remained skeptical the Catholic high school would ever get off the ground, but Stacey and Menendez remained confident.
“Our parents instilled in us that if there’s something you really want, you just don’t take no for an answer,” Stacey said. “So when we would head down a direction and that would get closed off, we would just back up and go a different way.”
Stacey has four children and Menendez has three. The oldest of them are in the seventh grade.
Ozark Catholic Academy is an independent Catholic high school. It operates within the Diocese of Little Rock with permission from the bishop and maintains an ongoing relationship with the Diocesan Office of Catholic Schools, according to the school’s website.
Mary Helen Schaefer, 15, is a sophomore at Ozark Catholic Academy. She attended St. Vincent de Paul Catholic School in Rogers through eighth grade and Haas Hall Academy Bentonville for ninth grade.
St. Joseph School in Fayetteville is the only other Catholic school in Benton and Washington counties. It offers classes through eighth grade.
Mary Helen said she’s excited about the year ahead, adding she values the spiritual aspect of a Catholic education. She was a little anxious about starting at a new school, but said social events held in advance of the first day of classes helped ease that anxiety.
“We did laser tag. We had a pool party and cookouts and stuff like that, just so everyone could meet everyone and get to know each other,” she said.
The Rev. Jason Sharbaugh, an associate pastor at St. Thomas Aquinas University Parish in Fayetteville, was among the clergy visiting the school Thursday. Catholic school is about more than just academics, he said.
“It’s about the whole person, how they develop as a man or as a woman, how they develop intellectually, how they treat other people,” Sharbaugh said.
The school plans to take its first field trip today to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville. In a couple of weeks, students will go on a five-day trip with Helping Hand Ministries to Kentucky, where they will learn about and volunteer in an Appalachian community, Rocha said.
Dave Perozek can be reached at dperozek@nwadg.com or on Twitter @NWADaveP.