As 2021 graduation ceremonies and parties have come and gone, it’s hard to believe that it has been ten years since the youngest of my two children last attended a class as a student of the Alliance St. Agnes Academy.
Christa and about a dozen other eighth graders were honored as “graduates” of the Academy on the evening of Friday, May 13, 2011.
Her sister, Kacey, experienced a similar ceremony in 2009.
As memory serves me, it was early February, 2002 when Alliance Saint Agnes Academy Principal Norman “Bud” Larsen was paying his weekly visit to KCOW Radio to record a short program that the station aired promoting St. Agnes activities. Without hesitation, and unexpected to me, Bud told me I should consider enrolling my young daughters in St. Agnes, a K-8 parochial school associated with the Holy Rosary Catholic Church.
“We can get their academic life started with a solid foundation,” Larsen said. “I promise you they’ll receive a blue-ribbon education.”
I expressed my concerns about managing tuition payments, and Bud assured me that grants and other programs would help pay the freight.
A meeting followed with the Holy Rosary Catholic Church Priest, Father Bryan Ernest, and, thanks to the St. Agnes Academy Foundations’ Adopt-a-Student Scholarship Program, a tuition agreement was made in short order. But as a longtime Lutheran, I was somewhat concerned whether my girls would have “the Catholic way is the only way” shoved down their throats. Father Bryan assured me that—while St. Agnes was indeed a Catholic school—the religion classes and masses would focus on Jesus Christ and the material would be appropriate for children of all denominations.
A short history lesson: Alliance St. Agnes celebrates its 113th birthday in 2021. In 1907, two nuns stepped off a train and attended Mass at a Catholic Church near 5th and Niobrara before continuing their journey to South Dakota. Seizing the opportunity, Father William McNamara met with the Sisters and asked them to help him start a school in Alliance. Father William had been left $15,000 by his sister, Agnes McNamara Pope, for the purpose of starting such a school. The nuns agreed, a building was soon constructed near 12th and Cheyenne, and classes began in September 1908 with 90 students.
My two daughters, Kacey, and Christa attended their first day of class at St. Agnes in late August of 2002. In the seven and nine years, respectively, of attending school at St. Agnes, neither of my girls ever came home and said they had a bad day. More importantly, my girls received the “blue ribbon education” I was promised, and their spiritual lives continued to grow. Because of St. Agnes, I truly believe Cynthia and I achieved every parent’s dream: Giving our children more than what we had.
The St. Agnes Staff upheld Larsen’s promise. The blue-ribbon education Kacey and Christa received serves as my inspiration for this week’s column.
Several teachers remained at St. Agnes for over 10, 15, 20, even 40+ years. It’s no secret that those teachers would have been paid a higher salary and received more lucrative benefits by moving on to jobs in a public school. But their belief in the mission of St. Agnes has remained steadfast, and hundreds of children, including mine, have benefited by their selflessness.
After receiving a good education at Alliance High School, both of my girls earned degrees from colleges on the opposite ends of the state. Kacey at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Christa at Chadron State College. Kacey has also received her master’s degree from the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
Both of my daughters are now working at being — or becoming — blue-ribbon elementary school educators. Kacey, for three years, in the Ralston Public Schools near Omaha and Christa, for two years, at the Immanuel Lutheran School in Alliance.