Saint Raphael Catholic School

Preschool-8th Catholic Classical School

At Saint Raphael Catholic School we are building joy! We are a Catholic classical school, grades Preschool-8th grade, located in the heart of the Crystal community. Our mission is to cultivate a family-centered community that classically forms students through a faithfully Catholic education, bringing forth joyful witnesses to the love of Jesus Christ.

The foundation of a faithfully Catholic and classical education is the traditional understanding of the human person.  This conviction begins with the belief in universal human nature (that all men are created equal with a body, soul, intellect, desires, and free will), and ends with the belief that each human person is created imago Dei, that is, in the image and likeness of God. Our school, therefore, takes as its primary goal the student’s formation to understand with wisdom and understanding who they are, where they are, and where they are going.  

We accomplish our mission in partnership with our students’ parents. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is clear that “parents are the primary educators of their children.” And similarly, “the role of every parent is to educate their children in the Catholic faith.” Our school is founded on transcendental values of truth, beauty and goodness. To communicate these values to students takes an army of living references who respond with love, patience, faith and wisdom in both good and turbulent times.

In the classroom, our teachers convey these transcendental values first by living the conviction that each student is the likeness of God. Standards of excellence, respect, and dignity are expected at age-appropriate academic, social, emotional, and physical levels. Second, our school has adopted a classical curriculum model from the Western education tradition. This model stresses reading and discussing classical texts in a rigorous liberal arts tradition. The primary years of this model are spent absorbing facts and systematically laying the foundations for advanced study. In higher grades, students learn logic, semantics, and argumentation.