St. Isidore’s

Gap Year

The St. Isidore Foundation ultimately plans to offer a fully-residential, four-year undergraduate program as St. Isidore’s College, but we recognize that a full college may take some time to develop. Therefore, we currently plan to begin our programming by offering a “gap year” for recent high-school graduates who want to take some time to discern whether, when, and/or where to go to college, begin a career, enter religious life or seminary, get married, etc.

Such a program requires less structure than a full college does, and as such the details of our gap year program are actually not currently as defined as are the details of our ideal collegiate program, but we want our gap year program to encapsulate in a single year as much of the life and spirit of our ideal collegiate program as possible.

To that end, students in our gap year program will live, pray, work, and study on our farm for about a full year beginning sometime shortly after their graduation from high school (perhaps in June or July) and ending sometime shortly before the start of their next venture in life (perhaps in July or August). During that year, students will experience a full season in the life of the farm. They will consequently receive little introductions to agriculture, animal husbandry, food storage and preparation, etc. (though not in the robust way that students in our full collegiate program will be introduced to such things). They will pray communally on a daily basis and have opportunities to attend Mass together. They will also participate in readings and discussions of books drawn from the college’s Humanities Sequence.

God willing, after we have established a successful gap year program, but before formally inaugurating our full four-year program, we will develop a Junior College.