First-time visitors to Elyria Catholic High School may be impressed with the school’s appearance. With its first phase built in 1948, the bright, well-kept, updated and expanded building contains the best of both worlds, simultaneously evoking tradition and the advantages of a modern learning environment.
But walking through the hallways hardly provides a full sense of the school. To accurately get that picture, you’d need to additionally visit Blessing House in Lorain, which serves as a temporary safe home for children; the Children’s Developmental Center in Amherst, where care and instruction are provided for children with special needs; Wesleyan Village in Elyria, a senior living community; or countless other facilities where social-service needs are met.
You’d also need to attend a march, show up at City Hall or travel to the latest community where disaster has struck.
On any given day after school, on weekends and during vacations, those are likely places where you would find Elyria Catholic students carrying out the values-based lessons they have learned in the classroom. Elyria Catholic defines success not only in terms of academic excellence — nearly all students go on to higher education — but also by the leadership roles that graduates take in promoting community and society improvement.
School President Amy Butler puts it simply: “Eventually, we want our students to change the world.”
A tall order, but the school’s record of distinguished alums lends credence to the goal. In Elyria and elsewhere in Lorain County, Elyria Catholic graduates hold numerous leadership positions in government. The school also claims educators, missionaries, corporate and philanthropic leaders, medical professionals and others devoted to the school’s mission to educate students “to act as caring, just and responsible citizens of the world.”
The school’s teachers and administrators believe that religion should not merely be a fourth R in the litany of reading, ’riting and ’rithmetic. “Religion solely for the sake of knowledge is of very little value,” declares Deacon Patrick Humphrey, who chairs the school’s theology department. “It must be lived. It must be embraced.”
Among those who have embraced the mission are Scott and Rebecca Serazin, classmates in the class of 1970, and their three children, Rachel (Karnani) ’98, Andrew ’99 and Nathan ’04. Scott, Elyria’s law director, and Rebecca (Becky), a PhD who was named Ohio’s school psychologist of the year in 2013, have carried out the mandate of public service they learned at Elyria Catholic and have set the example for their children to do the same.
“We made the choice to send them to Elyria Catholic because of the spirit that begins in the classroom,” says Becky.
“You meet a lot of people in the work I do,” says Scott. “There is just something about an Elyria Catholic grad. The barriers come down faster, the trust is there and you seem to click from the start.”
Each of the couple’s children has carried the tradition of service into professional life. “Each in their own way share a world view,” says Becky.
Rachel — who had the distinction of being elected class president, valedictorian, most athletic and homecoming queen at Elyria Catholic — brings those values to her work in her international travels as marketing director for a major national and international accounting preparation firm. Andrew, a Rhodes scholar, formerly was a senior program officer for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and now serves as the president of the Templeton World Charities Foundation, headquartered in the Bahamas. Nathan is a pediatrician who has spent time in Malawi treating children with AIDS. He now works with children with cancer.
“I think it is fair to say that values learned in high school can be multigenerational,” Scott says.
“What really brings us joy is to see how our children reach out to help children now,” Becky says. “There is no greater joy than seeing that they ‘get’ it. And a lot of that comes from the sense of family at Elyria Catholic. Family is more than blood. It is city, community, world.”
Butler believes that is the heart of an Elyria Catholic education.
“Our job is to introduce students to the many opportunities to serve and to develop a passion to do something,” she says. “Our world is thirsty for that.”