About NPA

Mission, Vision, and Philosophy

Our Mission is to provide a Catholic, college-prep, middle school education to low-income students from Southeast San Diego. In partnership with our families, we are committed to each student's total development—academic, social, physical, spiritual, and emotional—by emphasizing serious study and personal and social responsibility.

Our Vision is that our students succeed in high school, college, and beyond, and that they become role models and leaders in their communities.

Our Philosophy is built on the Jesuit idea of cura personalis, care for the whole person, including the academic, social, physical, spiritual, and emotional. Only with this noble, integrated, classic approach in mind can we accomplish our lofty mission and graduate young persons of character and intellect sufficient enough to ensure that they will become college graduates and—most importantly—caring, competent persons for others, role models and leaders in their families and in their communities.

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We take up our teaching mission with true enthusiasm. In the spirit of Nativity-model schools, we persevere to be well-prepared instructors, forceful motivators, compassionate care-givers, and especially to be better adult examples of what we wish to see manifested in our students. For here, more than at most schools, we teach character and habits as avidly as we teach academic subjects.

We are extremely ambitious in our explicit mission—that is, to lay the foundation within all students to propel them toward becoming successful, responsible persons for others. In short, we work to instill the personal and academic habits that will sustain our graduates throughout the remainder of their education and guide them throughout the rest of their lives.

In admitting children of lower socio-economic and academic backgrounds, and in working to prepare them for college preparatory high schools and, ultimately, for college and professional lives, we accept a tremendous opportunity and responsibility. Most of our students arrive under-prepared to take full advantage of what we offer.

Therefore, we must be persistently optimistic, fair, patient, and affirming, even when faced with inconsistent student effort, poor parental support, and student acts of immaturity and frustration—not to mention individual students’ developmental and learning differences and hormonal changes, and, of course, our own frustrations.

Our greatest challenge is to be demanding, but reasonably so; to be nurturing, but uncompromising in our ethical and academic standards; and to be flexible and sympathetic in our teaching. We must strive to believe in the potential of each boy and girl, and in doing so give that student the confidence to believe in him/herself. Our approach must at times be tough, but always thoughtful and clever. In this manner, we can do much more than prepare students for high school (which is no small accomplishment, and is indeed our most immediate goal). We can teach them to become accountable for their actions and invested in their own future, and encourage them to become productive citizens and compassionate persons for others.

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