Dear St. Alphonsus Families,
Below are some highlights from my State of the School address from Wednesday night.
One of my main focuses for this year was to bring back our extracurricular programs. This year I was able to bring back Chess Scholars, Forensics, Junior Forensics, the middle school musical, as well as Boy Scouts, Girls Scouts, Children’s Choir and all of our athletics. A big thank you goes out to our staff, coaches, facilitators and parent volunteers for making all of those activities possible for our students.
In the classroom we also had successes. On the ITBS test from this March our students performed at and in many cases above, both Archdiocesan and national benchmarks in all the subject areas. On the STAR test in January, we had 80% proficiency in Reading, over 92% proficiency in Math and nearly 100% of students were at or above grade level in both areas. All of this is evidence of the great work that we know our teachers do with our students in the classroom. I am very proud of the work we have done this year and know that we will continue to build on this in the years to come.
This year was especially important for us because we had a visit from our accreditation team in October. This visit brought to light many positive things that our school does. Among them are: a strong sense of mission and Catholic identity, academically rigorous curriculum for all students rooted in Gospel values and a sense of commitment from the school when it comes to staff development and professional learning.
This process also brought to light a few things that we could work on as a school, as it does for all schools that go through accreditation. Some of the areas that we could improve upon are: having students do authentic service experiences in the community to work for social justice, improving our communication especially when it comes to the real cost to educate a child, and other community education initiatives. I am also making school safety a priority by having more staff attend school safety training seminars this summer, and planning to use our September Fun Run towards upgrading safety equipment around the school such as signage, walkies talkies, more secure doors, and reinforcing exterior glass among other things. School safety is unfortunately brought to our attention too often, but I promise that we do everything we can as far as training and equipment to make sure you and your students are safe at our school.
As we look forward to next year there will be some changes, such as moving the middle school to the third floor and having one class per grade. However, I know that although we are smaller in size, we will continue to offer a great school experience for all students. Our school will be an even more tight-knit community as I believe these changes will bring us closer physically, but also psychologically. We are going to continue to bring back more extracurricular activities such as more after school clubs, student government, service organizations and the DC trip in the fall.
I am also excited and proud of the fact that we will enter the summer with all of our classroom teaching positions filled for next year. This is a feat unto itself and I think speaks volumes about the commitment of our teachers. I am excited that for next year we will have a remodeled school library thanks to our most recent Fun Run fundraiser. And we will make progress on a full remodel of the science lab to make it brand new and well-equipped with everything our students and teachers need for an awesome science education experience.
Through all of these avenues we will continue to build and grow on the successful foundation in place already. I am confident that these amazing teachers are so committed and care so deeply about your children that they cannot help but to give your students the very best Catholic education.
Thank you for reading and have a safe holiday weekend!
Russ Johnston
