Dear School of St. Mary Families,
I hope this newsletter finds you and your family well! I wanted to update you on the many efforts taking place here at the School of St. Mary in regards to your child's education during the closure.
We continue to work in partnership with the Archdiocese of Chicago Office for Catholic Schools, along with our local, state, and federal health agencies to receive and share updates, guidance, and mandates surrounding the coronavirus disease or COVID-19. We will continue to work with Public Health Officials at the town, county, and state levels as we make decisions that impact all of us.
We are following constant guidance and direction from the Archdiocese of Chicago and the Illinois School Board of Education (ISBE) in our offering of alternative/e-Learning. However, there is no guidebook.
Our work to develop a systematic approach for our alternative/e-learning options for our School of St. Mary students continues. Staff is working to ensure that the design offers consistency across all grades. We will continue to work with subject-level and grade-level teachers to provide input, details and assignment design.
Our focus has been making sure that teachers are developing high-quality lessons, answering questions about content and teaching, and helping trouble-shoot along the way as teachers start using a digital platform they've only used for short periods. This planning and work are in addition to trying to make sure that students can still get some of the mental health and social-emotional supports they would have had access to if they'd been in school.
Our entire staff has received feedback from students, parents, and administration of the positives and challenges of our current situation. Overall, we feel incredibly blessed to have a community of educators, administrators, and families who have seamlessly embraced this challenging experience. We certainly appreciate any constructive criticism that would ultimately serve as a lesson to help us navigate these waters moving forward.
Our alternative/e-Learning at the School of St. Mary incorporates learning, not just enrichment. It will involve online or teacher-prepared lessons that students do when away from the physical school building. By using technology and email, the School of St. Mary, along with the Archdiocese of Chicago (AOC) Office of Catholic Schools (OCS), recognizes that education can continue even when students and teachers are not in the same location. It may include online instruction, independent research projects, and other document-based learning. As non-public schools, we are not constrained by the ISBE guidance on grading e-learning/alternative learning work. Our official position is that school work/assignments will be graded. We want our students to continue their education through high-quality e-learning/alternative learning during the closure. E-learning/alternative learning should not just be "busy work." It is important to us that this work is "counted" through grading to the greatest extent possible. We are working on non-electronic ways of pick-up and drop-off of assignments and should have more information for parents soon.
The staff met yesterday on Zoom to discuss how to use this online platform best. We currently have several teachers utilizing Zoom regularly. As we move forward, our expectation is for each teacher to create at least one online video lesson or to offer at least one live class period per day. It may be on Zoom or some other online platform. As mentioned above, one challenge we face is that not every primary grade student has access to a school device. Another is that some students aren't available when we offer live online instruction. We must consider the age of the learner as well as the access of younger children to electronic devices. Likewise, most of our primary students also need assistance with accessing learning platforms. The attention span of our students varies greatly as well and has to be taken into consideration when planning online and taped lessons. That is one of the reasons why not all staff has utilized face-to-screen instruction yet. There is a learning curve for our teachers, as well. Teachers will use Zoom, SeeSaw, Google Classroom, and its various components, and all our school online links. However - one size does not fit all: Staff will decide which platform best meets the needs of their students. While planning for instruction, grading, and answering questions, teachers are also investigating the various options available to them.
We need you to partner with us to ensure the e-learning/alternative learning works. Parents need to check email by 9:00 am for younger students' assignments as well as discuss with their older children their daily assignments. They need to provide a quiet place for the student to complete work, free from distractions. Parents should help students with technical issues as required. They need to communicate with the teacher (within school hours, from 9:00 am until 3:30 pm) if there are questions/issues or if they need help. Parents should ask their child to show them the completed assignment to know if it is complete. If they cannot show you the completed paper assignment or the completed online assignment, it might not be finished. Even with the online platforms, students can show parents that work was completed within their portal. All work/assignments submitted to teachers via Google Classroom can be shown to their parents for evidence of completion.
Many parents are working from home while juggling their child's remote learning responsibilities; some parents have multiple children to assist; some students have a challenging time managing self-paced tasks and multi-step directions on their own. Please let us know so that we can make accommodations to help with your child's learning.
Parents can create an Instagram or Facebook page to connect their activities as they did during Spring Break last year. Parents can help to create videos or a hashtag that our students and families can use to post online for others to view. We encourage parents to maintain an open dialogue with their child's teachers. If parents notice that their child is having a difficult time keeping up with alternative/e-Learning expectations, they need to engage that teacher in a conversation immediately. Parents have access to other families' email addresses and can easily set-up virtual play dates. The School Social Worker, Mrs. Homan, is available to help students and parents during this time; please take advantage of this. Mrs. Homan can be contacted at
[email protected].
It is important to remember that we're not alone in this incredibly unique situation. Public and private schools face the same challenges. We are learning as we go and modifying instructional strategies in response to student needs. Alternative/e-Learning for most schools were designed for one or two days at most. We are moving toward online learning platforms for daily lessons and communication across the grade levels that best meet our students' educational needs for weeks on end. Most of our teachers have been working around the clock to meet, if not exceed expectations and our parents should keep that in mind as well.
Please note that there will be no alternative/e-Learning expectations during the week of March 23rd - 27th, which was our regularly scheduled Spring Break. Having discussed this with both Father Mark and the Archdiocese, we are contractually obligated to provide this time to our teachers. They have earned it! Mary Catherine Nelson is creating a webpage on the school website with activities for students and parents to do on their own instead of teacher-led instruction. It may be found here.
The end of the Academic Third Quarter, initially scheduled for today, Friday, March 20th, has been moved back to last Friday, March 13th. All new students' assignments or work assigned as of Monday, March 16th, or after, will be counted for the students on their Academic Fourth Quarter grade. Students that had missing assignments/work before March 13th have until Wednesday, April 1st, to turn missing assignments or homework in. In the event a student was missing a quiz and or test, the student will be exempted from it. We hope to send report cards home in Kindergarten through Third grade. Students in Fourth through Eighth grade will receive their report cards electronically through PowerSchool.
On Saturday, March 7th, the Quiz Bowl Team competed in the Jr. Wildcat Middle School Tournament. All of the students represented the SOSM tremendously. The seventh and eighth-grade team made the top ten, placing 8th out of 27 teams. The sixth-grade team was terrific, and at the half was ranked 13th. Congratulations to Annia F. and Teddy C. for placing in the top twenty individually. Congratulations to Nick B. for placing in the top ten individually. The two teams fielded questions in Science, Math, History, Literature, Sports, and Pop Culture. Go, Crusaders!
A number of our School of St. Mary students took part in the Music Education Services annual Solofest event. At this event, students learned solos for their instruments. Along with a piano accompanist, they performed their songs for a judge. Aside from earning some great critiques from the judge, each student also received either a gold, silver, or bronze medal based on their performance.
The following student(s) participated, and are recognized by the award they received:
- Gracie Forlenza, Clarinet, Silver Medal
- Lizveth Garibay, Flute, Silver Medal
- Maxton Fluno, Trumpet, Silver Medal
- Tony Wong, Alto Saxophone, Gold Medal *Perfect Score!*
We are incredibly proud of each of the students and all the preparation that went into their performances. They will receive their medals within the next few weeks and proudly wear them to our final concert of the year in May. Many thanks to Kyle Anderson, our Band Director for the School of St. Mary! Great job, everyone!
We are excited to share that the School of St. Mary seventh-grader Alexandrine Harig was one of ten finalists in the NextUpService and Leadership Scholarship Awards, sponsored by the Blood Science Foundation. Alexandrine was selected to attend the finalists' dinner at the Drake Hotel. There were three finalists per age group, and they were invited to present their project during the cocktail hour to guests at the dinner. Alexandrine was announced as her age group's first-place winner of a $2,500 merit scholarship for leadership in service!
Alexandrine and her guests, Mrs. Hogan and Mrs. Tazioli, had the opportunity to meet some of the Foundation board members after the dinner and learned that two of the members are from the Archdiocese of Chicago. Her painting sold for $95 to support the Foundation's cause and was purchased by Nancy Angus, the Executive Director of the Mario Lemieux Foundation. Ms. Agnus donated the painting to Mrs. Hogan and Mrs. Tazioli. Congratulations, Alexandrine!
I'm hoping that you all are safe and sequestered away with your families during this crisis. These are challenging times for our nation and the world. It is encouraging to see the cooperation of so many in addressing the challenge. Hopefully, we will all do our part by isolating ourselves as much as possible and caring for the needs of our older (and younger) citizens.
Take care,
