This year, Escuela de Guadalupe will present its Fr. Tom Prag, SJ, Service Award to Melinda Couzens, a longtime board member, development committee chair, and volunteer whose two decades of service helped carry the school through some of its hardest years and into its most successful ones. Melinda will accept the award at Salud, the school’s annual gala, on October 10.
A Friend Brings a Friend
Melinda’s connection to Escuela started with an “Escuela 101,” which is a lunch-and-tour event that the school hosts throughout the year. Around 2006, then-board member Nan Williamson invited her friend, Melinda, to attend.
Melinda and her husband, John, both attended and left impressed. John had attended Catholic schools for most of his life.
“I joined the board pretty quickly after that,” she says.
At the time, Melinda’s three sons were in middle school and high school, and she was a stay-at-home mom. She had just started to feel like she had some time to herself and was looking for something worthwhile to do with it.
“I was involved in other things in the community,” she says. “But I always felt that Escuela de Guadalupe, by far, was the most important thing I’d ever done. A great education is the best opportunity we can provide to our community.”
A School Fighting to Stay Open
Melinda joined the board at a pivotal moment in Escuela’s history. Within about six months, the school was facing a genuine question of survival: close its doors, convert to a charter or public model, or find a way to make the private school model work. A Rocky Mountain News story on the school’s struggle helped draw in new support, but the deeper issue was structural. The founders, Fr. Tom Prag and Sister Susan Swain, had hoped fundraising alone could sustain a school that charged very low tuition. It wasn’t realistic.
The board had to figure out how to hold onto the school’s founding principles while also creating a sustainable business model: 1) provide a quality dual-language Catholic education to an underserved community; 2) charge each family tuition based on their income.
In the end, they decided that they had to increase tuition expectations on each family, as they also recruited more families who could afford to pay more. With a more reliable revenue stream, the school’s business model proved appealing to donors who wanted to see everyone with some stake in the outcome.
“Once we understood our tuition and fundraising goals for this new model, everyone started pounding the pavement,” Melinda said.
Though she would never claim the credit herself, Melinda emerged from that period as one of the board’s strongest fundraisers. She was soon asked to lead the board’s development committee, and under her leadership the school began setting, and breaking, its own fundraising records.
She still remembers what it felt like when the annual goal was $1 million.
“I would sometimes wake up at night thinking, ‘How are we going to make it?’” she says. “It kept me up at night, because if we didn’t bring it in, the school wouldn’t survive.”
Melinda served two three-year terms as a board member, the maximum allowed under the school’s bylaws. She stepped away for a few years, then returned to the board and to the development committee around 2018.
Back for a Pandemic, and a Classroom
Melinda’s second stint on the board began not long before COVID hit. Once again, she found herself helping the school through an unusually difficult stretch, this time by stepping into classrooms as a proctor while ill teachers taught remotely from home over video.
“The teacher was on the screen, and I had to keep control of the classroom, which was pretty daunting,” she admits.
Melinda’s service to Escuela has always gone beyond the boardroom. Over the years she has helped out in first grade, kindergarten, seventh grade, and fourth grade. (She candidly admits that fourth grade was the hardest!)
Whenever the subject of fundraising success comes up, Melinda is quick to redirect the credit to what she calls “the team:” Caroline Balcavage, Director of Philanthropy; current development committee chair Cissie Busch; Michelle Galuszka, the school’s previous president; Nicky Freeburg, the current president; and grants consultant Natalie Hopper, among many others she is careful to name before herself.
“The fundraising goals kept being called ‘stretches,’” she says. “And they kept getting stretchier! But in my opinion, there are very few causes that are as good as this one. You’re providing a rigorous, faith-based education to people who really value it.”
A Family Tradition, With Hopes for a Third Generation
Melinda’s service to Escuela has always been something of a family affair. Her husband John attends every school event, and the couple has given generously over the years. Their son Fred was drawn in early, tagging along on errands like picking up donated computers from St. Mary’s Academy for Escuela’s old campus. Fred later served on the committee that organizes Salud and now sits on the board himself.
Melinda traces her own instinct to volunteer back to her mother, who spent summers running the snack bar at Little League games through the local Women’s Auxiliary. She sees a version of that same spirit in Escuela’s long line of parent and board volunteers, even as she notes that fewer families today have the flexibility to give that kind of time, since so many more parents now work full-time.
Melinda officially rolled off the board this year, but she is not stepping away from Escuela for good. These days she is focused on her growing number of grandchildren, and she is hoping at least one of them will end up at Escuela.
“I’d love for them to come here,” she says. Then, with a laugh, she admits, “I’m working on the third generation.”
