Dear friends of CRSM,
This past year, Cristo Rey St. Martin College Prep celebrated 20 years of educating young people in Waukegan and North Chicago!
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, over 50% of small businesses fail in their first 5 years. In fact, only 1/3 persist after 10 years. Clearly, CRSM beat those odds and continues its important mission.
Our students are flourishing despite stark statistics for other young people from lowincome backgrounds:
- High school drop-out rates at local public schools here remain close to 50% but at CRSM, over 91% of the students who start with us in 9th grade go on to graduate from CRSM. For the Class of 2025, it was a whopping 98%!
- Less than 15% of high school graduates in Waukegan and North Chicago enroll in college. In contrast, 100% of CRSM seniors were accepted to at least one bachelor’s program for the last 6 years in-a-row, with 91% directly enrolling into a bachelor’s program.
- CRSM Alumni graduate college at 3.5 X the rate for students from the lowest quartile of family income nationally. In fact, CRSM students are now graduating from Bachelor’s programs at the same rate as young people from the highest quartile of income.
- CRSM represents only 7% of the high school population in North Chicago and Waukegan, yet more than 50% of all new bachelor’s degrees being earned in our area by Pell-eligible students belong to CRSM alumni.
Our success has always been a team effort – a collective success resulting from the hard work of our students and teachers AND the generosity of so many people, including you! We can’t do it alone. Your support is more important than ever! Twenty years is an important milestone, but our dreams are greater than that. We hope that CRSM will flourish for decades and decades to come.
Your generosity makes it possible for our students to continue to develop their God-given
Sincerely,
Preston Kendall
President of CRSM