Bulgaria and Boston do not have much in common, but one thing they share is children in need. That’s why representatives from a Bulgarian nonprofit trust that helps young adults from the Roma ethnic minority visited the Epiphany School in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood in 2023 to learn from its innovative educational model.
Epiphany is not just a school, but a system of child and family support. It’s tuition-free, eschews merit-based admissions, and has extended its school day and year. It also provides a variety of services to students’ families and supports graduates.
“We stay with our families forever,” said the Rev. John Finley, an Episcopal priest who founded the middle school (grades 5-8) in 1997.
Epiphany has inspired schools elsewhere in the United States, like Imago Dei in Tucson and the Bishop Walker School in Washington, D.C., as well as elsewhere, such as Cours Ozanam in Marseille, France, and now, potentially, in Bulgaria. There are 21 schools based on the Epiphany’s model, 18 of them in the United States.
In recent years, Epiphany has expanded its focus, recognizing that support for the whole family starting from pregnancy is necessary to help low-income families thrive. In 2018, it started an Early Learning Center, which admits mothers to the program in the first trimester.
While elementary school is free to all, daycare is not. Many low-income mothers receive daycare vouchers, but they often impose restrictions. If a mother finds a job that puts her slightly over the income limit, she will lose her voucher, which discourages her from seeking a better job.
Mothers may also lose their vouchers if the government learns they have alternative sources of income—usually support from the child’s father. “It’s a very perverse system,” Finley said.
Because part of the model is helping parents improve their financial standing, assuring that mothers can access childcare, no matter how their circumstances change, is crucial to Epiphany. School staff members also make home visits and offer parenting classes for new parents.
As with graduates of the middle school, Epiphany follows graduates of the Early Learning Center past kindergarten. “With Head Start, those gains are lost,” Finley said, referring to the federally funded preschool program for low-income families.
He thinks this is because those children do not receive continuous support after the program ends. Epiphany strives to keep fathers involved, and while it does not necessarily expect the parents to remain romantically involved, the goal is for all graduates of the Early Learning Center to have both parents supporting their lives.
He hopes that graduates of the Early Learning Center do not attend the middle school—because the middle schoolers start out below grade level, and Epiphany hopes the children who attended the Early Learning Center will not fall behind.
Epiphany’s rejection of merit-based admissions is a key aspect of the school’s model. Epiphany staff believe that schools should not cherry-pick low-income students who have the most engaged parents or earlier success.
While new fifth-graders tend to start out below grade level, eighth-graders graduate above grade level. And with the school’s long history, Finley know the gains are not temporary. “We can say where our kids who are almost 40 years old are,” he said. “It’s not just four utopian years.”
Another novel aspect of Epiphany is that it supports faculty, which has helped attract a diverse cadre of teachers and support staff. The school’s teaching fellows program provides room and board, as well as a salary, and many teachers receive additional support to earn master’s degrees in urban education at Boston College.
“We have a lot of Epiphany graduates—and men—teaching, and I attribute that to the teaching fellows,” Finley said. For students of color, having male teachers who look like them has long term benefits, but in general, few teachers are men of color. Many of Epiphany’s full-time faculty are former teaching fellows, and some also live in campus housing.
Epiphany hopes to branch out into housing for students’ families, a great need in Boston’s tight housing market. One of Epiphany’s partner churches, Church of the Redeemer in Newton, is working on a Habitat for Humanity project and helping Epiphany families apply. But Epiphany would like to do more.
“We want to build 40 units of family-sized housing,” which families would own after a certain period, Finley said.
Finley is grateful that people have been inspired by Epiphany’s model, but he does not think everyone should do it the same way. “We’re not running a franchise,” he said.
Other schools might be single-sex, like the all-girls Esperanza Academy in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the second school based on Finley’s vision. Or they might be K-8. St. James in Philadelphia has a link with an Episcopal Service Corps program. But they share the same goal: reducing poverty and helping low-income children and families move up the economic ladder.
While the school has weekly chapel services, it does not expect students to profess a particular religious belief. “We’re not pumping out Episcopalians,” Finley said. “The goal is to make them more spiritually articulate about their beliefs.” Some students sing in the choir at nearby All Saints Ashmont, an Anglo-Catholic parish known for its boys’ singing program.
But the school is motivated by faith. “We believe that every person is sacred and that we find God through this belief,” said Marilisa Rita Gabresi-Deleveaux, director of Epiphany Impact Center, which shares best practices to improve educational results on a broad scale.
The Bulgaria-Boston partnership proceeds. At the invitation of the Bulgarian nonprofit trust, Gabresi-Deleveaux and a teacher from the Early Learning Center flew to Sofia last fall to speak about the model at a conference for social-welfare organizations. “Despite differences in countries and cultures, essential aspects of the Epiphany model can be adapted globally,” she said.
Greta Gaffin is a freelance writer based in Boston. She has a master of theological studies degree from Boston University and a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
