On the primary day again at Baton Rouge’s Franciscan Excessive Faculty after the winter break, issues are noisy. The cafeteria is packed as college students huddle round tables, excitedly catching up and cracking jokes over their crimson beans and rice.

They look like a fairly comfortable bunch. Honest sufficient, too: With small class sizes and a powerful group focus, Franciscan Excessive offers top-level schooling for a lot of college students whose households would not usually have the ability to afford the usual sky-high prices of personal schooling. 

“We sort of consider ourselves because the group’s Catholic college,” Franciscan Excessive Faculty President Eric Engemann mentioned.

It is a college with a distinction in additional methods than one. Whereas college students work their manner by means of a sometimes rigorous highschool curriculum 4 days every week, on the fifth, they take part within the college’s Company Work Research Program.

Merely put, they go to work.

With greater than 40 native companies concerned, this system acts as a type of worker leasing company and is accountable for funding nearly all of the scholars’ tuition charges.

College students head in all places from medical facilities to banks, regulation corporations to bike retailers.

The advantages are multilayered. Together with offering a substantial amount of monetary help — protecting the price of schooling on common to round $500 per yr per scholar — it helps college students get to know a wide range of professionals they would not in any other case meet and, within the course of, contemplate what they need to do as a profession.

“It offers (college students) an opportunity to make selections that a few of us do not get an opportunity to expertise till later in life,” Engemann mentioned.

“Additionally, not solely are they capable of put collectively their educational resume, with all of the issues they should prepare for faculty on the tutorial facet, but additionally a 4 yr work resume.”

It is a win for the companies concerned, too. Jamie Bourg, vp of individuals operations on the Louisiana Employees Compensation Company, mentioned the group had labored with 4 Franciscan Excessive college students because the 2019-20 college yr.

“Our function as a corporation is to assist Louisiana thrive, and our engagement with this program has been a straightforward and rewarding manner to try this,” she mentioned.

“Not solely have we had the chance to get to know and mentor younger folks in our group, now we have additionally helped to strengthen the expertise pipeline within the area. The scholars we’ve labored with have been engaged, impactful, and a pleasure to work with, as has the employees and administration.”

Most of Franciscan Excessive’s college students come from a community of feeder colleges, whereas the varsity itself does a variety of outreach to pick potential candidates. 

There’s loads of room to maneuver on the subject of grades, notably given many college students flip up academically behind to some extent. Nonetheless, the one nonnegotiable is the necessity to have the ability to flip up frequently.

“There is a excessive expectation for them to not solely be at college, however be at work too,” Engemann mentioned.

For all of the affect the varsity has had on its college students, and the group, there as soon as was a time when it seemed prefer it won’t even get off the bottom.

In August 2016, in the course of the very first week it was open, its campus was destroyed within the space’s historic flood. 

That would simply have been the tip. It wasn’t.

“The board and the sisters (of the Franciscan Missionaries of Our Woman, the varsity’s non secular sponsor) have been very devoted to creating positive it had an opportunity to succeed,” Engemann mentioned. “With out these folks it could have closed at that time.”

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As a substitute the varsity shifted, first to the Bon Carre Enterprise Heart off Florida Boulevard for 18 months, then to the St. Gerard Avenue web site in North Baton Rouge that it now inhabits.

Given how new it’s, and its dedication to serving to the underserved, the flood was simply one among a number of challenges it is confronted since its inception.

The necessity for funding is an ever-present concern. As Engemann factors out, not like different excessive colleges Franciscan Excessive does not have an in depth community of rich dad and mom and alumni to depend on. Moreover, the pandemic additionally posed its personal set of challenges.

But its mannequin seems to be working. The college has 115 alumni throughout three graduating courses, whereas all of its graduates have been accepted to a two or 4 yr college or school. It is a outstanding success price. 

There is a robust sense of group amongst college students and, given their closeness, they are a fairly boisterous group.

When Engemann and college Principal Ivan Earls stroll in on an English class, the place college students are quietly working their manner by means of a research of Chinua Achebe’s “Issues Fall Aside,” they’re perplexed by the silence. “They’re usually a bit louder than that,” Engemann mentioned, with a bemused smile.

For 17-year-old Franciscan Excessive scholar Kelsey Bell, it is this sense of group that she likes greatest. 

“I just like the small group and the coed physique,” she mentioned. “We’re all shut. It is not arduous to make associates.”

For the work portion of her schooling, Bell has frolicked at Baton Rouge regulation agency Taylor Porter, although she’s now leaning extra in direction of well being care as a future profession choice.

She mentioned it had been an awesome expertise.

“It has been a very good technique to community,” she mentioned. “I’ve had expertise with a variety of issues and lots of people.”