Sue Ferandin, executive director of the Augustine Educational Foundation(Courtesy photo)
The Augustine Educational Foundation, which provides scholarships for Catholic School students in Hawaii, will have its annual parish second collection the weekend of Feb.13 and 14.
In an interview with the Hawaii Catholic Herald, Sue Ferandin, executive director of the foundation, discusses the challenges her organization faces during this time of the coronavirus pandemic.
How has the pandemic affected the work of the Augustine Educational Foundation?
When we first went into quarantine mode last March, like everyone else, we felt paralyzed on how to best help our schools and families. The markets tumbled and although our AEF portfolio is carefully monitored by our board of directors and finance committee, we were looking at an almost 25% investment loss, 21 days away from awarding scholarships for the 2020-21 school year.
Where do you start when you know the need for scholarships will be at an all-time high, combined with decreasing enrollment projections and negative investment returns? With a lot of prayer and many emergency meetings, we created a course to serve our schools to the best of our ability.
With the guidance, experience and expertise of our seasoned investment advisor, Peter Backus from Morgan Stanley, we remained cautiously optimistic. Our first step was to tell our applicant families that we had to delay scholarship award notification until we could grasp the impact of what was happening. Thankfully, as of January 2021 we have experienced a full recovery with the AEF investments.
One example of how we altered our business during a time of COVID was when we worked with St. Joseph School in Hilo to assist with their campaign to save the school. This effort led to some amazing alumni and strong community support. We helped with their back-office work, handling and acknowledging donations, which amounted to almost $500,000. We still work hand-in-hand with St. Joseph, establishing COVID-related scholarships and reaching families needing tuition assistance.
At the end of the day, this pandemic has widened our scope of work. It’s never dull around here! The heads of school, principals, vice principals and school boards have faced more challenges than anyone could have ever predicted. Not only have we asked them to be quasi-health-care professionals with keeping students and staff safe, we have challenged them to practically open a new school within a school. In my 20 years with the AEF, I have never witnessed more dedicated school administrators and teachers working toward safely educating and spiritually encouraging our students.
How many students total received AEF scholarships for the 2020-2021 school year? How does this compare to last year?
For the 2020-21 school year, the AEF distributed $1,085,000 in tuition assistance to 275 students.
For the 2019-2020 school year, the AEF distributed $1,249,000 in tuition assistance to 315 students. While giving out less funding this year was not our ideal, we were happy we could manage larger scholarships averaging $1,750 per student. We hope to award $2,000 scholarships for the 2021-2022 school year.
Is there a goal for this year’s parish collection? How much was collected last year?
We are hopeful that awareness of our Feb. 13/14 second collection will reach parishioners. Because of COVID restrictions, we cannot put envelopes in the pews or arrange for scholarship recipients to speak at Masses, so we are counting on our pastors and deacons to get the word out. This year we anticipate more scholarship applicants than ever before.
Last year’s collection raised just over $100,000 with 100% of the collection going to Catholic families that send children to a Hawaii Catholic school in grades K-12. We remain optimistic, yet realistic. We may not be able to reach some very deserving students without this campaign.
Is there anything new happening at the AEF, any new initiatives?
Most recently we have enjoyed yet another wonderful AEF teacher curriculum grant come to fruition with Sacred Hearts Academy’s iTeach808. The AEF has been a proud sponsor of this annual event since 2014.
iTeach808 was done online this year with more than 300 educators from Catholic and public schools in Hawaii. We need to support our teachers now more than ever. This online workshop gave training on the topics of virtual classrooms, early learning literacy skills, building websites and social media platforms and 45 other ed-tech courses
Is there anyone you would like to recognize?
We would like to thank the PWH Educational Foundation for sticking by the AEF in support of our PWH Scholars Program (which gives Catholic school scholarships to public school students). Also, Franciscan Father Michel Dalton from Holy Trinity Parish, and our AEF board chair Charlotte White for having the good people at Holy Trinity share gift cards with our PWH Scholars. And Bishop Larry Silva, Msgr. Gary Secor, and our board of directors, who have really helped us stay the course during these most trying times.
We’ve seen a lot of wonderful humanity and compassion in the face of crisis and uncertainty. Again, we hold our Catholic schools in great regard for their perseverance as they navigate this period in time when their faith has been so essential to our belief that we will all get through this together.
