Following a court victory that approved a disputed $5 million state grant to the College of St. Joseph the Worker in Steubenville, Ohio, the Catholic trade school is hard at work expanding its campus across the Ohio River into West Virginia, its founder and president recently told CatholicVote.
In an interview, Jacob Imam called the court’s decision “a great victory for sanity” as well as “a victory for Christ” and celebrated the chance to grow the school while also revitalizing part of West Virginia. He explained that the grant allows St. Joseph to train students, who are actively working on renovating historic buildings in the city of Weirton.
As CatholicVote previously reported, the state’s Water Development Authority (WDA) awarded the grant to fund the expansion and encourage economic development in the area, saying that training tradesmen would also “fill a need in West Virginia’s workforce.”
“What the state of West Virginia did is they saw that there were real opportunities to be able to take what are old dilapidated buildings, undeveloped land, utilities that need major renovation, and to be able to funnel money towards that effort through an economic development grant,” Imam told CatholicVote.
However, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of West Virginia sued the WDA in January on behalf of the American Humanist Association, challenging the grant and arguing that it unconstitutionally gave taxpayer money to a religious institution.
Judge Richard Lindsay ruled Sept. 25 that since the WDA and St. Joseph agreed that the grant would only be used for “real estate acquisition, site development, construction, infrastructure improvements, and supplies and equipment for workforce training,” it did not violate the Constitution.
Imam told CatholicVote that he had been optimistic that the grant would ultimately be approved, calling the ACLU’s challenge “insane” and “an attack on [the] first values of our nation.”
“It was an attack on something that seemed just obvious — an obvious economic need for the area as well,” he continued, adding that the lawsuit targeted “both the spiritual core and the economic core of a people” and seemed “blatantly unjust.”
Students have already begun renovating an old historic bank in Weirton, Imam said. As St. Joseph provides training in carpentry, electrical skills, plumbing, and HVAC, the expansion project equips students with opportunities to put their abilities to the test. Imam also highlighted that with the expansion project, the school is focused on “preserv[ing] the best parts of building that had greater structural and aesthetic longevity and combin[ing] that with the new technology that we have today.”
Imam said that ultimately, he sees the dispute over the grant as a challenge that gave the school an opportunity to become stronger.
“I see this as more of an affirmation of who we are and what we’re trying to do,” he said. “You know, we were named a Newman Guide school last year — I thought that was pretty good [credibility], that we were an orthodox Catholic institution, getting sued by the ACLU.”
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