Middle school students at St. Matthias School have joined the International Baccalaureate community.

The school, at 4910 N. Claremont, announced Sept. 4 that it received certification from the Switzerland-based International Baccalaureate program for its Middle Years Programme after a three-year effort to rewrite curriculum and train the teachers and the staff.

St. Matthias Upper School Principal Gail Hulse explained that IB program focuses on three main areas: offering a holistic education, fostering intercultural awareness and helping students develop into confident communicators who are able to ask questions and share their thoughts, all with “a good dose of global perspective.”

“We are global citizens, and we are rooted in a faith that calls us to reach out in faith to the world,” Hulse said. “Jesus was the master teacher, and Jesus teaches us to go out and interact with others.”

Parents and students who attended the assembly where the certification was announced said they have already seen the benefits.

Eighth-grader Elisabeth McGovern said she and her classmates have benefitted from the three years the faculty took to develop the program and put it in place.

“I have grown so much,” she said. “It’s a different and more challenging curriculum. We take what we learn in school and apply it to our lives and the world around us.”

McGovern said that the IB program has helped with her communication skills.

“Communicators express their thoughts clearly and confidently and listen to others,” she said.

She expects the skills she is learning now will help her in later life.

“It will help with whatever you do,” she said.

St. Matthias school board president Mary McMahon, who has a daughter in seventh grade, said that she has seen her daughter become more willing to take risks.

“It’s really been something to see her step out and make her voice heard,” McMahon said.

Sandria Morten, St. Matthias’ IB coordinator, said that teachers worked together to write interdisciplinary curriculum units that met the IB organization standards, and then implemented them. A two-day site visit from IB representatives last spring determined that the school meets the criteria for IB recognition; it will have to be recertified every five years.

One such interdisciplinary unit focused on the making and planting of a school garden. Sixthgraders learned about horticulture as they determined what to plant and when, but also developed spatial math skills as they designed and built raised beds for the plants.

“They learned about perimeter and area and volume,” Morten said. “And then they had the physical experience of building and planting.”

Parents have commented that their children seem more confident after using the IB curriculum, Morten said, and the current eighth-grade class has seen significant gains in its standardized test scores.

McMahon said the school would love to work toward getting IB certification for its lower grades as well, but funding is always an issue.

Bill Lynch has sponsored St. Matthias through the Big Shoulders Fund for about 10 years, helping the school raise money for projects from adding a playground and more noticeable signage to offering a one-to-one computer notebook program for middle schoolers — and sending all the teachers for classes on how to incorporate the technology. IB certification, he said, “is kind of a culmination. It’s all going to focus on the kids.”

Father John Sanaghan, pastor of St. Matthias, compared the school to the time-and-space traveling police box known as the TARDIS on “Doctor Who.”

Visitors to the TARDIS inevitably comment that it’s “bigger on the inside.” But that’s not the important thing about the blue wooden box, he said. The important thing is that its passengers can explore the entire universe, past, present and future.

“St. Matthias is a TARDIS,” Sanaghan said. “Our students walk through that door, and not just the world, but the universe opens up to them.”

In achieving certification, St. Matthias became the seventh Catholic elementary school in the United States to have a recognized IB middle school program, and the first such school in Illinois.

In the Archdiocese of Chicago, Trinity High School offers the IB Diploma Program for high schoolers, and DePaul Prep and Josephinum Academy are working toward certification.

Dominican Sister Mary Paul McCaughey, superintendent of schools for the archdiocese, congratulated St. Matthias on its accomplishment.

“It is no mean accomplishment to completely change the way you teach, the way you bring the world to life for young people,” she said. She noted that when you start a project, you have to know what you want the end to be. “Our end is heaven and college. The International Baccalaureate works for both, doesn’t it?”