Maria Elena Juarez
Maria Elena Juarez
Michael A. Moynihan
Michael A. Moynihan

The first time Freeborn & Peters LLP co-managing partner Michael A. Moynihan ever met a work-study employee, the high school student kept staring out the conference room window from the firm’s offices on South Wacker Drive.

Thirty floors up, the student said he had never seen Lake Michigan from that perspective before.

Moynihan’s eyes were opened. Only a few miles from the boy’s home, the professional world downtown seemed foreign. He wondered what else the student from the Southwest Side had never seen.

For several years, students from Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in Pilsen have gone to the firm a few times each month as part of a work/study program. Moynihan said he’s grown passionate about opening doors for others facing obstacles.

And last month, one of the first Cristo Rey students Freeborn hosted through the program became a full-time employee.

The students come through the Corporate Work Study Program run by the Chicago-based Cristo Rey Network, which operates schools across the country under the same model.

The program splits a full-time job between four low-income students. Each student works five days at the job each month and their pay goes toward their tuition at the private college preparatory high school.

Corporate partners like Freeborn get eager workers. The teens get an opportunity to see what a white-collar career is like.

Forty of the Cristo Rey program’s 182 Chicago corporate partners this past school year were in law — a who’s who of the city’s largest firms. The students are often hired by the firms in human resources, accounting and office services roles.

Moynihan said the students do a tremendous job

“They come in, and they’re taught to shake your hand and look you in the eye and show up on time and ask questions,” he said. “It’s remarkable how prepared they are to receive direction.”

Jose Rodriguez, vice president of the Corporate Work Study Program, said the marketing assistant position at Freeborn filled by Maria Elena Juarez, a 2012 graduate of Cristo Rey, stands out.

In seventh grade, Juarez would listen to her older sister talk about her job downtown and how she would take her lunch break in Millennium Park with her friends.

It was a completely different world than her life in the neighborhood. Her dad works in a factory and her mom was a stay-at-home mom.

When she got off the Cristo Rey bus to report for her first day at Freeborn in 2008, then-14-year-old Juarez almost couldn’t believe she got to work near the Willis Tower.

“These kids are completely changing the trajectory of not only their lives but their families’ lives,” Rodriguez said.

Juarez credited Freeborn co-workers who talked her through the nuances of college applications and encouraged her even when she received rejection letters from some colleges.

And they introduced her to a staple of workplace culture: March Madness brackets.

Juarez worked at the firm all four years of high school and during winter and summer breaks during her time studying at Xavier University in Cincinnati.

She had secured the marketing job before she graduated from Xavier in May.

As she entered orientation for the new job, the same co-workers who had seen her grow up welcomed her back.

“It makes you feel like everything that you’ve done has been worth all the sacrifices and sleepless nights studying for tests have been worth it,” Juarez said.

As compensation for the students’ work, Freeborn and the program’s other partners fund Cristo Rey to cover the majority of the students’ tuition expenses.

Rodriguez said the network will have 32 schools throughout the country this fall, including Christ the King Jesuit College Preparatory School on the West Side, which opened in 2008. The program has about 12,000 students total.

“It’s amazing, just giving somebody what you think of as kind of an inconsequential opportunity can do,” Moynihan said.