Culture & Society · The Record
Montclair school's award release reports 85% scholarship rate and gives no class size
The release carried by Insider NJ names neither the award nor a year. A Diocese of Bridgeport release does name a 2026 Fordham award, and says it recognized an innovation lab in Connecticut.
A press release published by Insider NJ in July 2026 reports that St. Cassian School in Upper Montclair received an award from Fordham University for its STREAM curriculum, and quotes Principal Maria Llanes saying it was "a great honor to receive the award and represent the Archdiocese of Newark as a leader in innovation." The same release reports that every member of the school's eighth-grade class was accepted to a preferred high school this year, and that 85% of that class earned academic scholarships. The release also states that the program had not been recognized since it began nearly a decade ago, and lists those who accepted on the school's behalf: Father Stephen Fichter, vicar of education for the Archdiocese of Newark; Superintendent Barbara Dolan; and Llanes.
That is the claim. The record - the documents a reader can open and check - is thinner than the coverage in one respect and richer in another, and the gap between the two is worth walking slowly.
Begin with the award itself. The release, as published, gives it no title and no year. It refers to the award, and later to the honor, and stops there. Nothing in that text identifies which Fordham program conferred it or under what name. That is not a small omission: an award's name is the handle by which a reader checks it.
A separate primary document supplies a name, though not necessarily the same one. A release from the Diocese of Bridgeport, in Connecticut, refers to a "2026 Catholic School Leadership Award for Excellence in STREAM Education from Fordham University" and states that Fordham and that diocese "have recognized the Saint Carlo Acutis Innovation Lab." What that document records is a lab, in another diocese, under a named award.
It is tempting to lay the two side by side and call them one honor. The documents do not license that. One names an award and a year; the other names neither. So the honest statement of the record is narrower and, I think, more useful: a Fordham STREAM award with a stated 2026 title exists in the public record for another institution, and the release describing St. Cassian's recognition does not say whether it is that award. Readers who saw the Montclair coverage have no way, from these documents, to place the school's honor in any wider field.
The second gap is arithmetic. The release reports a percentage without a base. It does not say how many students are in the eighth-grade class. The federal Private School Universe Survey lists the school at 190 Lorraine Ave, Upper Montclair, as Roman Catholic and serving "Grades PK - 8" - a single-campus parish school with one graduating cohort a year. In a class of that kind, a scholarship percentage is a coarse instrument: a handful of students moves it several points, and the same figure can describe a very different number of children from one year to the next. Nothing here contradicts the school's numbers. They are simply not confirmable, and no outlet that carried the release asked for the denominator.
A third detail belongs in the record because this is how small errors harden. Insider NJ renders one of Llanes's sentences as "Our students are also thriving academically because STREAM education encourages higher-order thinking." Patch, carrying the same announcement for Montclair readers, renders it as "Our students are thriving academically because STREAM education encourages higher-order thinking." The two versions differ by a single word. It changes little in meaning and a good deal in what a future citation can safely claim to be verbatim.
Analysis
What a press release is for and what a record is for are different jobs, and the friction here is ordinary rather than scandalous. The school's own curriculum page describes "Integrating STREAM (Science, Technology, Religion, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics) Across the Curriculum," which is a description of a program, not of a competition. The award coverage inherits that register. But once a percentage and a claim of recognition enter circulation, they travel without their footnotes, and the footnotes are the part a parent choosing a school would want.
One falsifiable prediction, checkable by June 30, 2027. If Fordham's Center for Catholic School Leadership publishes a publicly readable list of its 2026 honorees by that date, St. Cassian's recognition will appear on it under the same award title the Bridgeport release uses. If the list shows St. Cassian holding a differently titled Fordham honor, this reading is wrong. If no public list exists by then, the question stays open - which is itself the finding here, since a granting institution that documents nothing readable leaves every claim about its awards resting on the recipients' own releases.