In the mid- to late 1990s, the number of Catholic schools across the country was less than half what it been 20 years earlier.

So it wasn’t a big surprise when Chuck McPhillips’ idea to open a new Catholic school in Norfolk raised a few eyebrows.

As a board member for the James-Barry Robinson School Trust – a Catholic charitable trust that grew out of a former boys school, now a residential treatment center – the Norfolk attorney had pondered the idea for a while.

Were the finances there to start a school and then keep it going? Would parents enroll their children? Norfolk had lost its share of Catholic schools over the years, some to the decline in population, others to suburban sprawl. Faith-based education seemed to be losing favor.

By 2001, a new generation of trustees was on the Barry Robinson board, and enthusiasm for a new Catholic school grew. The right people came together to make things happen. And in late 2004, Saint Patrick Catholic School broke ground.

In the fall of 2005, though the new school wasn’t quite finished, Saint Patrick’s welcomed its first students in temporary quarters. After a $25 million, 15-month construction project, the new building and campus opened in January 2006.

Now in its eighth year, Saint Patrick’s is going strong, with nearly 400 students in grades pre-kindergarten through eighth grade in a handsome brick building on Bolling Avenue in Norfolk’s Larchmont neighborhood. In its fourth year, the school achieved full accreditation from the Southern Association of Independent Schools and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.

“It’s done incredible things for the families, the communities, and the parishes,” McPhillips says. “It’s a place where, even though we’ve only been there eight years now, it’s hard to imagine it not being there.”

Saint Patrick’s is an independently funded private school, meaning it’s not run by a parish or diocese. But it is inherently Catholic, devoted to teaching students about the Catholic faith. About 64 percent of the student body is Catholic.

“At Saint Patrick’s Catholic School, we pray,” says Principal Stephen J. Hammond, who has been with the school since the beginning. “One of the most important things is teaching children how to pray. We worship – Catholic and what we call friends of other faiths – all together.”

The school uses a philosophy that focuses on the total formation of a child, with 43 student goals that touch on all parts of a child’s life, including spiritual and physical aspects, he says.

“We invite children to reflect upon and to accept in the manner that they can, at the age level and at the developmental level they are,” he says of the school’s approach to learning. “They freely choose. This is part of a decision-making curriculum. We guide decision-making abilities of children.”

Students spend their school career keeping a portfolio, noting their growth over the years. Inside it they tuck artwork, papers – anything they think helped define them as a person. At the end of eighth grade, every student gives a presentation to a group of adults chronicling how he or she has grown.

“You walk out of that room and think, ‘These are the folks who are going to run this town,’ ” says McPhillips, who attends the presentations. “You hope they’ll run this town. They are the future leaders.”

That’s been one of his goals all along – to integrate the school with the community in such a way that it’s building future leaders who will stay in Norfolk and raise their families in Norfolk.

McPhillips, 53, is a product of Norfolk – he attended elementary school at the old Blessed Sacrament School, graduated from Norfolk Academy and returned to practice law in Norfolk after college and law school. He’s a partner at Kaufman & Canoles and lives with Theresa, his wife of 21 years, in Norfolk.

John Tucker, a former longtime headmaster of Norfolk Academy who now serves as a consultant to Saint Patrick’s, calls the total formation schooling and the “journey” portfolio remarkable ideas and “an intriguing model” that he thinks could be replicated in other Catholic schools.

“I would dare to say there’s nothing like it in the country,” says Tucker, who spent 12 years at Norfolk Academy before retiring in 2000. “The students are just having an incredible educational experience.”

Service projects are plentiful – the 15-month-long Million Pennies Project helped children in Haiti, girls regularly chop off and donate their hair to Locks of Love and an on-campus garden is tended by the school’s youngest students. The garden’s harvest is given to the needy.

Public speaking is encouraged at every grade level – if a kindergarten student has a parent stop in for lunch, the child is asked to stand up in the dining room and introduce Mom or Dad.

Students also help lead tours of the school, speaking to small groups of parents and interested educators about what they’re learning. These “Snapshots” begin at 8 a.m. on Thursdays with smiling, uniformed students opening the school doors and wishing visitors good morning.

These student “legati” (Latin for ambassadors) lead visitors throughout the airy, two-story building, talking about what they learn and experience. There’s the dining room, where students sit in multi-age groups of eight in order to build relationships. There’s the gym, where they have physical education every other day in order to build strong bodies.

George A. Neskis listened to his fourth-grade son, George E., give the welcome one fall morning and told the group gathered how proud he was of his once-shy child. Saint Patrick’s, he said, “is exceptional.”

Neskis, a Norfolk lawyer whose parents are Greek immigrants, said he was nervous about choosing a Catholic school for his children, since his own experience was with public school. He quickly realized there was nothing to fear.

“We knew we had stumbled onto something really special,” says Neskis, who now serves on the school’s leadership board and is one of the parents who speaks during the tours. The total formation approach is not a gimmick, he says. “It’s just a wonderful approach.”

“I didn’t know what value-based education meant,” he says. “Whatever you take from it, it’s really about kids being changed as they’re being taught. It’s worth every penny it takes to send our kids here.”

It costs about $8,000 to send a child to Saint Patrick’s, less for grades pre-K through fourth.  But McPhillips says he and the board try to keep the tuition at a level that parents can afford. About a third of Saint Patrick’s students are on financial aid. After all, the school is named after Saint Patrick’s Church – the first Catholic church in Norfolk. The church was burned to the ground in 1856, and the suspects were thought to be part of a political movement that resented Irish priest Matthew O’Keefe’s willingness to let anyone, black or white, rich or poor, worship.

“We’ve done everything we can to keep tuition at a level where working class, middle-class folks can see it as accessible,” McPhillips says.

After finishing eighth grade at Saint Patrick’s, students head to other schools in the area – some to

Bishop Sullivan Catholic High School in Virginia Beach, some to Norfolk Academy, others to public high schools. The first class of graduating eighth-graders are freshmen in college this year.

McPhillips brushes off sole credit for getting the school off the ground, heaping praise on his fellow board members, on Tucker, on Hammond, on the many “community friends” who have helped through the years. “I got the lucky break to be able to lead it,” he says.

But he’s clearly proud that Catholic school enrollment in the Diocese of Richmond, which encompasses Hampton Roads, started rising last year after bottoming out a few years ago.

“I hope it’s not too immodest to claim that Saint Patrick’s, maybe, played a role in helping that occur,” he says. “Whatever skepticism there was about whether a Catholic education was viable in an old city like Norfolk, I guess we’ve proven it is. And that’s emboldened a lot of people to get behind it.”

Hammond, though, says McPhillips deserves his share of praise. From the beginning, Hammond says, “Chuck wanted the highest quality education that could be developed,” helping fund state-of-the-art technology throughout the school and emphasizing writing, languages, arts and music.

“Chuck has just been a gift for Catholic education,” says Annette Parsons, chief education administrator of the diocese’s Office of Catholic Education. “He’s just been a dynamo. A force for good in helping to ensure that families who want a Catholic education for their children have the ability to do so.”

McPhillips, who has no children of his own, says educating children was just something he came to believe in.

“I think about Norfolk and Hampton Roads and what roles these young folks are preparing to assume, whether it’s in religious life, or leadership in business, in government, or in the community,” he says. “They’re going to make this a better place for all of us, and sustain a city I love dearly. I’m a lucky man to have had this opportunity.”

From the start, Lisa Howard knew she might put herself out of a job one day.

At the time, the concept of Smart Beginnings – a nonprofit public-private partnership created to address the issue of children’s readiness for school – was getting off the ground. The organization would bring together business, civic and philanthropic leaders to examine why one in five children in South Hampton Roads was entering kindergarten unprepared.

“People would ask, ‘How can kids not be ready for kindergarten?’ ” says Howard, the group’s president and CEO. “It surprised everyone, but at the national level, research was coming out that told us learning begins long before that child gets on the yellow school bus.” The group seized onto research that showed that 90 percent of a child’s brain is developed before age 5. And that retention rates for local kindergartners – the number of kids held back – were at 25 percent.

There was a window of opportunity there – and Smart Beginnings stepped in. South Hampton Roads was one of three communities in the state selected in 2005 to receive a $500,000 grant from the Virginia Department of Social Services, matched by funds from the Batten Educational Achievement Fund. That fund was started by Jane Batten and her husband, Frank, the longtime publisher of The Virginian-Pilot, which publishes Distinction magazine.

With Howard at its helm, the group has spent the past eight years thrusting the issue in the region’s face – and doing something about it. It’s given grants to preschools and their teachers, worked with child care centers to make them better, and pushed hard to get greater investment in early childhood education.

The efforts have worked. Since 2005, the rate of kids starting kindergarten unprepared has been cut in half. Smart Beginnings figures that some 9,000 children in South Hampton Roads have been affected, attending child care centers where the staff has worked to make buildings and themselves better.

“When a child starts behind, they stay behind,” says Howard, who previously worked for Square One, another school readiness initiative. “It is so hard for them to catch up. The sooner we can build that foundation, the better off they’re going to be.”

For Howard, 41, her work has been personal. A former public school teacher and military spouse who took eight months off after the birth of her first child, she knew how hard it could be to find quality child care. She also knew not every parent can spend time at home.

“Most families require a dual income,” says Howard, a Pennsylvania native who moved to Virginia about 15 years ago and lives in Virginia Beach. “It’s just not an option a lot of times for parents to make that choice to stay home.  And those who are are making a great sacrifice, and they need to be armed with information, too, to help their children become ready.”

Getting the right information out there was one of Smart Beginnings’ goals, through a series of awareness campaigns and the implementation of a system that would rate child care centers on their quality of care.

Such ratings – done on a five-star scale, like a restaurant or hotel might use – are done in other states. Smart Beginnings made it work in Virginia, inviting child care directors to accept the challenge of shining a spotlight on their centers. Every star earned means a center is going beyond the minimum licensing standards.

The Quality Rating Improvement system looks at everything from the education and training levels of teachers to the height of the chairs and tables used by 2- to 4-year-olds and how the preschool rooms are arranged. Do the teachers interact well with their charges? Are there enough books per child? Do the children have access to computers? Are the children and staff diligent about washing their hands?

Today, there are about 100 child care centers in the program – about one-third of the licensed centers in the region. The centers are rated every two years, spending the first year working with a mentor to make the necessary changes to move them beyond the minimum licensing standards.

Simonsdale Presbyterian Preschool in Portsmouth was one of Smart Beginnings’ first four-star rated centers. It was also one of the pilot schools in the program, which made director Carol Wilson a little nervous at first. The state-trained person rating the school scrutinized everything from top to bottom, and a mentor worked with the center for a year. Wilson and her staff took advantage of the $10,000 in grant money that came from Smart Beginnings to make changes.

“They gave us all these ideas and gave us the tools,” Wilson says, showing off the brightly colored, kid art-decorated rooms of her 60-child school, which is attached to Simonsdale Presbyterian Church. “They gave us new eyes – logical eyes to look at the program. And we made some changes.”

With the grant money, the school, which opened in 1971, replaced its ancient playground and bought needed equipment for the classrooms, such as a digital camera, multicultural toys and “cozy cubes” – big, hollowed-out wooden blocks filled with pillows where children can go if they need quiet time. The school is full of hands-on activities for children, such as a workbench where children can pound nails, large buckets filled with sand and rice that children can play with, and habitats for live animals – a turtle and hermit crabs – that they can learn about.

“This old building – we’re not the most beautiful place on the outside, but on the inside, we do our best to make it attractive to the parents and children,” says Wilson, the preschool’s director for 14 years. “You can have the most beautiful, state-of-the-art facility, but if you don’t have good teachers, it doesn’t matter.”

With the help of a Smart Beginnings teacher scholarship, assistant director Cindy Brown completed her associate’s degree. The whole staff became members of the National Association for the Education of Young Children and several teachers took classes at Tidewater Community College – as a four-star center, Simonsdale teachers must get 36 hours of training a year.

Simonsdale is now one of 12 four-star rated centers in South Hampton Roads, including Saint Patrick’s Catholic School. No fives exist in the state yet, because the guidelines are so stringent. A five-star rating, for example, requires all teachers in a preschool to have bachelor’s degrees – which are not always easy to get because of teachers’ salaries.

Howard’s pride in the schools that accepted Smart Beginnings’ challenge to improve is evident. In 2010, Smart Beginnings commissioned the University of Virginia’s Center for the Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning to look at the link between the quality of child care and how it readied children for school.

The study showed that children who attended a star-rated child care center that was mentored through Smart Beginnings were ahead emotionally, socially and in language development, and had overall higher-quality learning environments.

A lot of the preschool programs “were already doing great things for kids,” Howard says. “This was a matter of bumping them up.”

But Smart Beginnings – which exists across the state through 29 coalitions, including in Williamsburg and on the Peninsula – is drawing to a close in South Hampton Roads. By the end of 2013, four of the five communities here will have taken over what Howard and her group started, with the help of $500,000 challenge grants that each locality was required to match.

Portsmouth was the only one that did not accept the grant, but Howard says work in early childhood education there is continuing through organizations such as the nonprofit Portsmouth Reads. The rated preschool centers will stay in the ratings program.

Howard “has just been a leader in changing the focus, and changing the focus in the business community and in South Hampton Roads,” says Kathryn Jessee, who coordinates the R U Ready program in Chesapeake, which formed about a year ago and picks up where Smart Beginnings left off.

Throughout this year, Howard will work to ensure the transition to the localities. She’s already started working with a new advocacy group that launched in November. Elevate Early Education (or E3), chaired by Cox Communications head Gary McCollum, will focus on getting greater public investment for early childhood education at the state level – something Howard says is sorely needed. Howard serves as president and chief executive officer of E3, which hopes to fuel the work of early childhood education groups such as the Smart Beginnings coalitions.

“You don’t keep doing business the same way if you want different results,” she says. “But we keep educating our children in the same way and expecting different results. Our policies in our state have not kept up with the research. At some point, we have to have the stars aligning. And we’ve got to make strategic investments in our education system.”

For Howard, it’s bittersweet as she prepares to pass to the baton to others to continue the work in Hampton Roads. And while she feels good about the work that’s been done, Howard says she knows there is still more to do. A lot more.

“There are still parents who need to be educated about how important this period of child development is, there are still teachers who need to be educated and there are still early childhood programs that need to be worked upon,” she says. “There’s tremendous work happening out there, but there needs to be greater public investment to really keep that work moving forward and to really have the impact that we’ve been able to have here.”