Lifelong Learning

I've been taking an online class this summer, 21 Things for the 21st Century Administrator. What a great course - probably one of the best I've ever taken (either in person or online). I've learned so much this summer, but it sometimes feels like I'm trying to drink from a firehose! One of the things I've found helpful is to bookmark all the great ideas I'm finding. I'm using Diigo - an online tool for annotating, archiving, and organizing all the great information available on the web, and then using it to research, share and collaborate. If you follow this link, you'll see my collection of links on the topic of lifelong learning (right from our mission statement, and a topic about which I'm passionate). Let me know what you think!

Summer Newsletter is in the (E)Mail!

Here's the link to the brand new summer newsletter!

And a quick picture from my summer...

See you all soon!

All the very best things about St. Paul School

As you may remember, we conducted a Family Satisfaction Survey in the spring. A full report with the findings will be coming soon (thanks, School Committee and Dianne Romanelli for all your hard work on this report). In the meantime, I created a "Tagxedo Word Cloud" that I think you'll enjoy!

I created this word cloud by pasting all of your responses from the question "What I like best about St. Paul School" into the Tagxedo website. The site takes the total word count and creates a word cloud based on the words used most often (the relative size of each word is based on how often it showed up in the survey responses). This word cloud uses the top 100 words (after taking out all common words - a, and, the, etc.).

I think this infographic is a great way to share all of the good news about our school - from the eyes of our parents.  Thanks, everyone, for taking the time to respond!

8th Grade Graduation Photos

Click here to view these pictures larger

Why I Love St. Paul....

School Photo Montage

A Beautiful Letter

As you know, we're working hard on making St. Paul School a safe place for all of our children. Our bullying committee is developing policies and programs that we think will proactively help us to form our children into good Christian young men and women.
Yesterday, a parent shared with me a letter posted on the blog site "Momastery," titled "For Adam." I shared this link with our teachers, and several of them have already read it with their classes. I think you might want to read it with your children at home, too. It's a beautiful expression of a parent's wish for her third grade son.
I think what I loved most about this letter is NOT the message about being a good bystander, and standing up for a child who is being bullied (although that is the main point of the letter).
What struck me the most was this statement:
We do not care if you are the smartest or fastest or coolest or funniest. There will be lots of contests at school, and we don’t care if you win a single one of them. We don’t care if you get straight As. We don’t care if the girls think you’re cute or whether you’re picked first or last for kickball at recess. We don’t care if you are your teacher’s favorite or not. We don’t care if you have the best clothes or most Pokemon cards or coolest gadgets. We just don’t care.
 We don’t send you to school to become the best at anything at all. We already love you as much as we possibly could. You do not have to earn our love or pride and you can’t lose it. That’s done.
We send you to school to practice being brave and kind.
Kind people are brave people. Brave is not a feeling that you should wait for. It is a decision. It is a decision that compassion is more important than fear, than fitting in, than following the crowd.
This is so true. Especially here at St. Paul. Our children will be good readers and will learn Math and Science, and yes, even Religion - that's just who our kids are. They'll win awards, and most of them will, in fact, be the best at something. We have a building full of over-achievers (trust me on this one). What's much more difficult, for all of the adults who care about these precious children, is helping them to live out their call to discipleship - to be brave and kind and compassionate - and to act on this call.