Westmont’s Holy Trinity Catholic School – a Thriving Catholic Microschool

This story was written by Jack Figge at The Pillar. Click HERE to read the full story. Excerpts about Holy Trinity are featured below.

Microschooling is an approach for institutions with fewer than 150 students; it involves teaching students in multi-age classrooms, where teachers focus on teaching to individual students, rather than the class. Across the country, microschool administrators and teachers report students performing above average on standardized tests, attributing success to small class sizes and the mutli-grade model.https://www.holytrinitywestmont.org/school/

Holy Trinity School in Westmont, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, adjusted to the microschool model two years ago. A 2024 standardized test for K-8 students indicated that 45% of students were at or above grade level in reading and 39% in math. But by spring 2025, scores increased to 82% in reading and 79% in math.

“Our standardized test scores were great last year,” Dr. Pamela Simon, principal at Holy Trinity School told The Pillar. “Across the board, the students are learning, they are growing academically, and I think everybody in the building has seen the social growth and just the joy that the kids feel in being in school.”

Since adjusting to the microschool model, Jessica Paulsen, a middle school teacher at Holy Trinity School has seen a huge transformation in students, not just in academic performance.

“Microschooling really offers the opportunity for our older seventh and eighth grade students to show leadership. For example, sixth graders are assigned an eighth grade buddy, who is helping them make that transition to middle school and just be supportive to them,” Paulsen said. “Since we are one class, it instills that we’re one community, and we have students that will help each other learn and work together.”

This model also encourages students to become more independent and accountable for their own learning.

“Students learn how to advocate for themselves in this environment,” Simon said. “When they need something, they know to go to the teacher and ask for it specifically and know what to ask for and how to ask for the right things so that they can facilitate their own learning.”

Compared to same-grade educational models, Paulsen said that she has had to be more intentional with the students and spends more time working with students one-on-one and in small group settings.

Currently, Paulsen’s 6th, 7th, and 8th grade classroom is doing a poetry unit, where students are studying “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe. At the beginning, Paulsen provides the same lesson on the basics of poetry. Then, she splits the class into their grade levels to read specific, grade-appropriate excerpts of the poem. And if younger students are excelling, Paulsen is free to move them to a higher reading group.

“If I was teaching at just one of those grade levels, I would focus on one poem, what type of figurative language they are expected to understand at that level and provide practice and then assess,” Paulsen said. “However, within a multi-age environment, what I’m able to do is as a whole group we are learning how to annotate, we are learning some background about the poet, but then we are breaking off into smaller groups where they will receive age-appropriate poems as smaller groups.”

“There’s a lot of interchanging between groups and really looking at their individual needs,” Paulsen added.