SPIRE Fund benefit to promote access for special needs students in Catholic schools
A special fundrasier (diojeffcity.org/aces) will be held for the SPIRE Fund on Thursday, Nov. 5, 2026, in Jefferson City. Information can be found in the graphic on this page.
Jayden had a hard time achieving success and fitting in with other kids at school.
His parents wanted to send him to Our Lady of Lourdes Interparish School (OLLIS) in Columbia, but at that time, the school didn’t have the resources he needed.
Jayden has been identified as being on the autism spectrum.
At his old school, he felt judged and overlooked.
“I wasn’t really receiving the help I needed,” he said. “And I never had any confidence.”
A year later, OLLIS hired a second learning resource specialist, and Jayden transferred in.
“One thing I find in Catholic education is that people believe in you way more than you might even believe in yourself,” said Jayden, who’s now a student at Fr. Tolton Regional Catholic High School.
His time at OLLIS made a huge difference.
He became more social, stepped outside his comfort zone by participating in sports, built meaningful friendships and most importantly, grew closer to God.
He also discovered the importance of being the person God created him to be.
“That means everything,” said Jayden. “That’s the most important thing I’ve learned in my life.”
With access to the right training and resources, Jayden’s story could be repeated again and again in Catholic schools throughout the diocese.
That’s the ultimate purpose of the SPIRE Fund (diojeffcity.org/special-learning-opportunities) — to help more Catholic schools in these 38 counties welcome and educate students with a broader range of abilities and learning styles.
“Catholic education is important because our No. 1 mission is to share the Catholic faith, to help children develop a relationship with our Lord, to build upon that spiritual foundation that families start at home,” said Kathryn Coulson, interim diocesan superintendent of Catholic schools and director of curriculum and instruction.
“Parents are laying that foundation with prayer and growing that connection with God,” said Mrs. Coulson. “In Catholic schools, we build upon that by providing faith formation and opportunities for prayer and encountering our Lord.
“In doing so, we’re hopefully raising saints and helping them reach the ultimate goal of holiness and being with God in heaven forever.”
Substantial benefits
The SPIRE Fund was established in 2015 to support special education services at Catholic schools throughout this diocese.
Its main premise is that Jesus loves and welcomes all children, and his schools should do likewise.
SPIRE’s objectives fall into two categories:
- raising awareness among school administrators, teachers, staff and parents of the need to provide Catholic education to children with special needs, as well as the availability of workshops and professional development opportunities to help teachers bring out the children’s best efforts; and
- raising money and helping secure grants to pay for staff development, classroom materials and additional personnel to help students with special needs achieve success in Catholic schools.
Last year, money from the SPIRE Fund helped expand the successful Vogelweid Learning Program at St. Peter School in Jefferson City to Helias Catholic High School.
Vogelweid helps students with a broad range of needs achieve success at both schools.
Promoters of the SPIRE Fund see Vogelweid as a template for expanding access to Catholic education in other parts of the diocese.
“As we look to the future, I’d like to see all of our schools be able to provide an education for students with a variety of learning needs,” said Mrs. Coulson.
That’s a tall order, due in part to the geographical vastness of the diocese, the variance of available local resources, and the diversity of needs.
Mrs. Coulson pointed to recent studies indicating that 1 in 36 people have been identified as being on the autism spectrum, which profoundly affects how they learn and relate to the world around them.
An estimated 8 to 9 percent of students have some sort of learning disability, with as many as 1 in 5 having some level of dyslexia.
“And when you add in other factors, such as an auditory processing disorder or dysgraphia or dyspraxia, you have a lot of children who need some kind of specialized help to achieve full success,” Mrs. Coulson.
Ambitiously addressing these needs will make Catholic schools more inclusive and by definition, more Catholic.
“It’s going to help build self confidence in the children,” said Mrs. Coulson. “It’s going to help them better understand themselves and how they learn, and give them tools and strategies that are going to help them for the rest of their lives.”
Those children, in turn, will grow up to be strong assets to their parishes and communities.
Being able to enroll a broader range of children in the diocese’s 36 Catholic grade schools and three Catholic high schools will benefit the children in all of them.
“Because it helps everyone understand that we live in a very diverse world,” said Mrs. Coulson. “And that diversity is manifested in many different forms — including how our brain works, how we learn, how we approach tasks and solve problems.”
It will also help the schools fulfill their mission “to serve God, spread the Gospel and bring children and their families closer to Jesus,” she said.
Angels among us
OLLIS Assistant Principal Sara Blandford laments the mistaken perception that Catholic schools are elitist, exclusive college preparatory environments.
“In working here these past three years, I’ve come to find that we have an amazing opportunity to really live out the Catholic mission of giving everybody a seat at the table, where they can celebrate their faith on a daily basis and know they have a community to belong to,” she said.
One of her own children received specialized services at OLLIS.
Mrs. Blandford is convinced that children with special needs and learning differences “are like angels walking among us.”
“I feel like we can learn even more from them than they learn from us,” she said. “They’ve helped me shift my thinking from trying to fit everybody into a box, to recognizing and forming the whole child.”
She’s enjoyed watching the students at OLLIS gradually but intentionally move toward a culture of acceptance for people who learn differently.
“They see them as their peers and want to get to know them and help them,” she said.
At the same time, students who didn’t realize they could use extra help are coming forward to ask for what they need.
The number of students involved in OLLIS’s peer mentoring program has grown from about 10 children last year to 35 this year.
“All of this is giving us a chance to learn and grow,” said Mrs. Blandford. “We’re all learning that it’s okay to struggle and that none of us are meant to fit in a box.”
Out of the box
Mrs. Coulson called for prayerful and generous financial support for the SPIRE Fund.
The program’s budget of about $100,000 per year currently supports the Vogelweid program at Helias Catholic.
“We would like to expand the program at Helias and build on this model in schools throughout the diocese,” said Mrs. Coulson. “We want to create an endowment to help all of our schools provide an education to those who have learning disabilities or special needs.”
She pointed out that when a Catholic school is unable to enroll one child, his or her brothers and sisters often won’t go there, either.
That’s a loss for everyone, because having children in a because having children in a Catholic school together tends to bring the whole family closer to God.
Mrs. Blandford said Catholic schools offer an environment where children, especially children of faith, can be “completely themselves.”
“A message I keep trying to get across to families and educators who are starting this journey with us is that we tend to want kids to fit into a box,” she said. “And we think that if they don’t fit, something’s wrong, and maybe we don’t have a place for them here.
“The most important thing we can do for our kids is change that narrative to them standing on their own box,” she said. “They’re doing their own thing, and it’s our job to meet them where they are.”
That, she said, is why SPIRE is so important.
“Because we love those kids standing on that box,” she said. “We’ve got to help them build that box and maintain it.”
She acknowledged that getting every school to that point will be “hard and sticky and messy and uncomfortable at times.”
“But if we’re truly rooted in Catholic education, then it’s our job — our mission — to make sure that everyone has access to it,” she said.
“God’s work”
Mrs. Blandford said she would love to see the SPIRE endowment fully funded within the next five years.
She asserted that if that happens, an administrator from any Catholic school in the diocese would be able to apply for a grant for adaptive materials and specialized training in order to enroll students with special needs.
Mrs. Coulson pointed out that Catholic school teachers and administrators are always asking, “What is God calling us to do?”
“And in working with children, we approach that question through God’s eyes, seeing each child as one of his own,” she stated.
“The work being done with SPIRE and what we’re trying to build within our diocese is God’s work,” she said. “It’s what Christ modeled for us in embracing every person as a child of God and seeing them and loving them as they are.”
Kyle Stephan is the creative and digital content manager for the Jefferson City diocese.
