As Millennium Midstream co-founder John O’Shea was in the process of selling his company to Eagle Rock Energy in 2007 and 2008, he took a step back from his career for a sabbatical.

However, that didn’t mean it was time for him to slow down.

“When we sold part of the company back in 2006, my wife and I set up a foundation and we got involved with inner-city grade schools,” O’Shea, now a managing director for multi-billion dollar private equity group Tenaska Capital Management, told Midstream Business, describing his work to expand access to education for underprivileged students in Houston. “Then we learned about a group that was trying to start an inner-city high school.”

That school was Cristo Rey, a network of Catholic schools serving urban high school students below the poverty level. The Cristo Rey Network consists of 26 schools around the U.S. in 17 states and Washington, D.C., where children from families who couldn’t otherwise afford a college-prep education are put on track for college.

“Our mission is to take the neediest kids,” O’Shea said. “If you can afford to go to this school, you can’t come here.”

That’s because the annual cost to attend a school year at Cristo Rey is about $12,000, O’Shea said, and schools in the Cristo Rey Network don’t receive public funding. When faced with this conundrum as the Cristo Rey Network began in 1996, the founders came up with an innovative business model in which the students would help to fund their own educations, sharply reducing out-ofpocket tuition costs for their families to an average of only $300, O’Shea said. This model became the Cristo Rey Network’s Corporate Work Study Program.

On-the-job learning

The Corporate Work Study Program, like so many innovative ideas, was born out of necessity. According to O’Shea, when the program began it seemed like the only way to fund a successful private high school filled with students from families whose average income per capita is only $8,800.

“We’re not a charter school, which operates on a kind of lottery system,” O’Shea said. Charter schools have some independence in their operation, but because they still receive public funding they don’t have complete freedom in determining which students they accept. Because it is separate from the public school system, Cristo Rey can choose its own students. Its mission is to accept students with the greatest need—a mandate the founders felt so strongly about that they included it as one of the network’s 10 standards that every Cristo Rey school must meet, O’Shea said.

Educating those students requires funding though, and another of the standards is that every Cristo Rey Network school must be financially sound and primarily funded through the work study program, which all students participate in.

However, what began as a funding device quickly became one of the school’s greatest educational tools.

“What [Cristo Rey’s founders] learned—and we’ve been doing it for 18 years—is the greatest education the kids get is on the job site,” O’Shea said. “Because they’re working, they’re putting their math, their English, sometimes science skills, sometimes history skills, they’re seeing how all those work in a corporate environment, whether it’s a law firm, an accounting firm, an energy firm.”

In Houston, about one-third of the work study jobs are in the energy industry, O’Shea said.

Making memories

Some of O’Shea’s favorite Cristo Rey memories came from his involvement with the work study program.

Each year, a group of chaperones accompanies the students on their first day of work. O’Shea has been a part of that group for several of the six years the Houston school has operated.

“It’s always interesting seeing these kids, most of them have never been downtown before,” O’Shea reflected. “And every year I’ve had at least one kid who’s never been through a revolving door.

“Teaching them how to use something as simple as going through a revolving door and coming out on the other side,” something those with white-collar backgrounds take for granted, gave O’Shea a sense of what the program gives the Cristo Rey students—an experience of a professional world they can aspire to, and that Cristo Rey can help them reach.

While that world tends to dazzle Cristo Rey students at first, as O’Shea witnessed when the students got their first view of the Houston skyline from the Sky Lobby on the 60th floor of the JPMorgan Chase Tower, the students don’t enter it unprepared.

Before their first day of work, all Cristo Rey freshmen attend a month-long business “boot camp,” where they learn lessons ranging from how to tie a necktie to how to make a good first impression, taught by people working in the industry.

First impressions

“Paul Posoli, who runs JP Morgan’s global energy commodities business, teaches a class on first impressions,” O’Shea said.

“Every year he’s taught it—how to look people in the eye, how to shake hands, and he has every kid come into the door and shake his hand. If they don’t shake his hand right, he sends them to the back of the line. So it’s how to interact with businessmen when you’re 14 years old,” the midstream executive added.

During the time he’s worked with Cristo Rey, O’Shea has gained a newfound respect for the level of skill and professionalism young people can demonstrate in the workplace. By the time they’re seniors, students have years of work experience under their belts and the confidence that comes with applying the lessons learned at Cristo Rey to the corporate world.

O’Shea told Midstream Business about a day that epitomized the difference between the bewildered freshmen getting their first introduction to the corporate world and the seniors on their way to college. Many of the companies involved in the work study program have their own mentoring programs for their student workers, and one of those is Wells Fargo. As they were going through introductions, a Houston senior—a member of the first class of seniors to enter Cristo Rey as freshmen—was asked about his work experience, O’Shea recalled.

“And he said, ‘Well, I worked for Locke Lord, I’ve worked for BP, I’ve worked for Grant Thornton and now I’m working for Wells Fargo,’” O’Shea said. “And someone on the other side said, ‘Oh my gosh, you have a better résumé than I have.’ And here’s this 17-year-old high school student, with this breadth of experience, all in the corporate environment.”

Most of those students probably wouldn’t have gotten the chance to develop the skills and experience they have now without the program, O’Shea said.

Room to grow

Before the Houston school opened, the founders of the well-known KIPP and YES Prep schools met with the Cristo Rey founder, and asked if there was anything they could do to help the fledgling school, O’Shea said. The people involved in educating underprivileged kids in Houston aren’t interested in growing only their own programs, he added, but in making sure those kids get the best education so they can lead successful lives.

“That was probably a defining moment for me in 2008, when here are two schools, and you could almost call them competing schools … and all these founders cared about was getting as many inner-city school kids to have a college prep education as possible,” O’Shea said. “That gave me just a heartwarming experience, that there’s a lot of people trying to do good.”

And they are certainly doing that. When asked for elaboration on his work with Cristo Rey, O’Shea said somewhat hesitantly, “I just recently took over the whole network of schools.”

While still working primarily in Houston, O’Shea is serving as interim president and CEO of the entire Cristo Rey Network. “I’ll get to see what’s going on at the other schools across the country, but mostly I’ll define the long-term leadership for the network,” he said. “I’m just kind of stepping in to fill a role while we’re between presidents right now.”

Much more eagerly, he launched into a description of the overwhelming success the Houston school has achieved and the network’s plans to open four new schools in 2014 and 2015.

“It’s been great, because it was an idea in 2007 that we’d bring college prep education to inner-city students in a faith-based setting to Houston,” O’Shea said. “And we successfully opened in 2009, and we’re in our sixth year, and we’re now the second-largest school in the network and among the leaders academically.”

Cristo Rey has experienced so much success, in fact, that it plans to open schools in Atlanta and San Jose, Calif., in the fall and schools in Dallas and Milwaukee in 2015.

Even while putting this growth plan into action, O’Shea stays focused on Cristo Rey’s purpose: “Our mission is to get all of our kids into college, and [in Houston] we’ve graduated two classes and 100% of our kids have gotten into college. And across the United States, we graduated 1,441 kids this year, and 100% of them got into college.

“So, we’re doing our mission,” he added. “At the end of the day, if we don’t educate these kids and get them ready for college, then we ultimately haven’t done our job.”

Caryn Livingston can be reached at clivingston@hartenergy.com or 713-260-6433.