By Christina Gray
Five young people from around the country are living communally at the old St. Cecilia Parish convent while working their very first jobs as Catholic school teachers. They head out in different directions each morning, to Stella Maris Academy and St. Robert, St. Veronica, St. Paul and Notre Dame des Victoires schools.
Ally Grieshop, Ellie Wyllie, Andrew Song, Fatima Arevalo and Sydney King were strangers before they met last summer. When Catholic San Francisco met them at St. Cecilia in November, the group’s youthful kinship was clear to see as they navigate the bumps and blessings of being a first-time teacher in an unknown city – together.
Catholic Talent Project
The young teachers are the Archdiocese of San Francisco’s first cohort of St. Thomas More Fellows. The teaching fellowship is a recruitment, formation and placement program of the Catholic Talent Project, a nonprofit launched by Thomas Carroll, former superintendent of schools for the Archdiocese of Boston. It was conceived in part as a strategic solution to a national teacher shortage. In a competitive market, the nationwide deficit has had perhaps a greater impact on Catholic schools, where hiring qualified, mission-aligned teachers is a priority, according to Superintendent of Schools Chris Fisher. He visited all the schools in the Archdiocese of San Francisco in 2024, his first year in the role.
“I heard time and time again that a main challenge for our principals is finding teachers who are aligned and qualified, and then retaining those teachers for the long term,” he said.
Fisher lived on the East Coast before his move to San Francisco. That’s when he got to know and work with Carroll. Carroll, now president of the Catholic Talent Project, concluded that the future of Catholic school renewal depends upon the cultivation of faithful Catholic witnesses to serve as classroom teachers, principals and superintendents in Catholic schools.
“A school is its teachers,” Fisher said. “A Catholic school relies on teachers who share the same vision of Catholic education to serve and to teach the students.”
Carroll developed the Catholic Talent Project to help Boston’s Catholic schools recruit, form, place and retain teachers, administrators and other school leaders. Fisher helped him develop the formation program it uses today.
The St. Thomas More Fellowship is designed for recent college graduates who have not been teachers before. Applicants go through a rigorous screening process that involves both program administrators in Boston and its partner diocese or school. Fellows, when chosen, make a commitment to the two-year program of formation and support that begins with a five-week summer training in Boston for new teachers. Later, after a series of screenings and interviews, fellows are placed in their first teaching jobs at Catholic schools in their own dioceses.
“I saw firsthand, through my experience at the schools in Boston, that the model worked,” said Fisher. “The fellowship brought the teachers in, they formed them well, they placed them appropriately, they retained them, and they became part of the life of the school.”
Fifty new Catholic teachers were recruited for Boston schools in the first two years, he said.
The Archdiocese of San Francisco became a partner in the St. Thomas More Fellowship program last year. The Catholic Talent Project hopes to add other Catholic dioceses to the fellowship program in coming years. Fisher got the full support of Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone and Vicar General & Moderator of the Curia Father Patrick Summerhays. The program is self-supporting, said Fisher, thanks to local benefactors who believe in the future of Catholic education.
According to catholictalentproject.org, Boston and San Francisco both have an “urgent need for courageous witnesses to the Gospel.”
San Francisco’s high cost of living
Sarah Currier, associate superintendent of schools, said Catholic schools within the Archdiocese of San Francisco share a reality that amplifies the teacher shortage: the high cost of living, specifically the shortage of affordable housing.
“It’s a very difficult city to move to,” she said. “It’s hard to live here, financially and practically. We need an influx of teachers, and we need to find creative ways to bring them in. Once they get here, they need to be supported.”
The fellows here, she said, have a teacher’s salary. They pay rent, but at a reduced rate that “helps them acclimate to the city” without struggling as they focus on their formation. They are supported in the credentialing process, too.
The St. Thomas More Fellowship is designed to make all aspects of becoming a Catholic school teacher “more possible,” she said.
“It’s bringing good Catholic, mission-aligned teachers to San Francisco and providing them with a soft landing place,” said Currier. “It’s providing them with a community of other new teachers who are doing the same thing they are doing for the same reasons they are doing them. And it’s giving us an opportunity to mentor them directly with support from a nonprofit organization.”
Fisher is confident that the archdiocese can “solve the problem of teacher recruitment and retainment on a scale here.”
“Part of it is inspiring in young people a teaching vocation and opening up in them the possibility that being a teacher and working in Catholic education is something they can do with their lives,” said Fisher. “There is a viable path for it, and now there is also a system and structure of support to help especially during the first two years of being a new teacher.”
St Thomas More Fellows:
Fatima Arevalo
St. Paul School,
San Francisco
“It’s really good to being able to live so closely with such strong, devout Catholics.”
San Francisco wasn’t on the career radar of Fatima Arevalo, 22. She grew up on the East Coast and graduated from Northeastern University in Boston after studying health science and psychology. During her junior year, she worked at a school for the blind and “fell in love with the students, with being in the classroom and with special education.” She calls her first teaching job in the first-grade homeroom of St. Paul School “very sweet and very rewarding.” “I love seeing how malleable the minds of young people are and being a witness to how they grow in their faith.”
Andrew Song
St. Robert School,
San Bruno
“We have a sense of solidarity as young people who are on fire for the faith with a common vocation to teach.”
Becoming a teacher “was not big on my mind in college,” said Andrew Song, 22, now teaching fifth and seventh grade math at St. Robert School. The UC Berkeley graduate who studied economics and data science “was thinking of maybe religious discernment or becoming a FOCUS (a Catholic missionary program) missionary.” “While I had never thought about being a middle school math teacher, there were qualities about teaching that were attractive to me,” said Song. He enjoyed leading Bible studies and giving catechetical talks and reflections at the Newman Center in college. “One of my Bible study students said to me, ‘Andrew, you light up when you talk about the faith.’ So, I thought maybe I had something for teaching in me.”
Ellie Wyllie
St. Veronica School,
South San Francisco
“I have been very pleasantly surprised by San Francisco. The people in the Catholic churches here are really solid.”
A Nebraska native and graduate of Benedictine College in Kansas, Wyllie’s first post-college job was in marketing. It didn’t fulfill her. “I realized I wanted to work with children and spread the faith,” she said. “The first year of teaching there are so many aspects you don’t really feel prepared for or even know about,” said Wyllie, 24, of the first-year learning curve. She was placed at St. Veronica School as the fifth-grade homeroom teacher. “It’s awesome to go through your first teaching experience with other people,” she said. “I think that is one of the best parts of the St. Thomas More Fellowship program.”
Sydney King
Notre Dame des Victoires School,
San Francisco
“Each of us already had a similarly strong love for the Church and a real sense that Christ is worth everything.”
Native Virginian Sydney King graduated in 2022 from Christopher Newport University in Newport News, VA., with a degree in philosophy. She added a master’s degree in international affairs from Johns Hopkins University to that in 2024. She took a job in public education, “not as a teacher,” she said, but in communications for an international affairs organization. She lived in Italy for almost three years, and, when she began planning her return to the U.S., saw an ad for the St. Thomas More Fellowship program on LinkedIn and applied to it. “I am really grateful to be placed at Notre Dame des Victoires because I have a real appreciation for different cultures,” said King, who is the fifth-grade homeroom teacher.
Ally Grieshop
Stella Maris Academy,
San Francisco
“Faithful Catholic witness is by far the most important thing the St. Thomas More Fellowship is looking for.”
A native of Columbus, Ohio, Grieshop, 22, graduated from the University of Kentucky with a degree in history and intended to go into political marketing. She loved her internship at the Heritage Foundation in Washington but realized that the marketing field was not for her. She fell in love with education after going through a “robust” formation program for interns at Heritage. As to why she believes the St. Thomas More Fellowship program chose her and the other members of the San Francisco cohort among the many applicants, she said she believed it was their faith above all things. She recited the famous last words of St. Thomas More before his execution by England’s King Henry VIII, prioritizing his religious conscience over the king’s authority. “I die the king’s good servant, but God’s first.”
Christina Gray is the lead writer for Catholic San Francisco.
