San Miguel High School, Tucson, Arizona

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Celestino Fernandez, Board Chairman of San Miguel High School in south Tucson, receives a check for $10,000 from Stephen Boyle, founder of Bellows. The grant was provided to support the extraordinary practicum education component of the high school’s learning environment.

Students of San Miguel attend classes four days a week and spend the fifth day each week working for eight hours in entry-level positions at major business corporations in Tucson. The students greatly benefit from learning to function within sophisticated work environments. Because of the preparation provided to the students by workforce experts on the faculty of San Miguel, the employers are uniformly impressed by the students’ productivity and can-do attitudes.

It is interesting to note that all the income earned by each student is contributed to San Miguel, which covers approximately 70% of the school’s overhead.

San Miguel High School is the newest addition to the “Christo Rey Network” of private high schools with Catholic affiliation. San Miguel opened just over a year ago in a poverty-level neighborhood of south Tucson, where parents of the students must be below 60% of the median income for the State of Arizona.