BK Alive - October 29th, 2021

October 29, 2021

BK Alive

News and Information for BK Families

THIS NEWSLETTER CONTAINS A LOT OF INFORMATION, AND THE LENGTH OF THE NEWSLETTER CAUSES IT TO BE TRUNCATED.

LOOK FOR THE BLUE LINK AT THE BOTTOM OF THE EMAIL THAT SAYS "VIEW ENTIRE MESSAGE" TO EXPAND THE EMAIL, OR CLICK HERE TO SEE ARCHIVED COMMUNICATIONS FROM BK.

Next Week

Monday 11/1 - Periods 1-4

8:30 AM Start, 3:00 PM Release

Tuesday 11/2 - Periods 5-7

9:00 AM Start, 2:45 - 3:15 PM Office Hours

Wednesday 11/3 - Straight 7

8:30 AM Start, 3:05 PM Release

Thursday 11/4 - Periods 1-3

All School Mass

9:00 AM Start, 3:05 PM Release

Friday 11/5 - Periods 4-7

8:30 AM Start, 3:00 PM Release

Important Upcoming Dates

October 29th - 31st - Bishop Kelly Fall Play, Dracula (See below for showtimes and tickets.)

Tuesday, November 2nd - Election Day

Thursday, November 4th - All School Mass

Friday, November 5th - Jean Day

Sunday, November 7th - Daylight Savings Ends

Saturday, November 6th - Bishop Kelly Foundation Winner's Choice Dinner and Auction

Fall Sports Schedules are at BKAtletics.org

School Calendars Can Be Found Here

Bell Schedules Can be Found Here

A Note from Rich and Mike

Dear BK Families,

We hope your Student Progress Conferences went well this week. Please know for those who were unable to attend that you are welcome to contact your child’s teachers directly via email. The education and development of your students is at the heart of our mission as a school.

Toward that end, in this week’s BK Alive we will highlight the exciting progress we are making on one of our four objectives for the school year - Each student achieves personal academic excellence. We will also share our weekly COVID-19 update and provide a letter from our BK Board of Governance Chairperson, Laura Alvarez-Schrag, about the BK President search process.

Each Student Achieves Academic Excellence

One of our four main priorities in our 2023 Strategic Plan is that “Each student achieves personal academic excellence”. While we have several strategies that we are focusing on this year, we wanted to provide a brief update on three of them including; 1) Strengthening Academic Support for Students, 2) Implement New Counseling Center, 3) Build stronger student- counselor relationships.

Academic Support:

At Bishop Kelly, we are incredibly dedicated to supporting our students in the area of academic assistance. In the last few years, we have added multiple resources and have streamlined our process for identifying students needing support and implementing interventions in classrooms. We are fortunate to have so many ways that our students can access support.

Four years ago, we opened up the Study Center. The idea was to create a space, open to any Bishop Kelly student, that is open before school, at lunch and after school for academic support. At any point in the day, you will find students in the Study Center quietly working on homework or asking for help from Mrs. Kurdy or Mrs. Slaven, our resident math guru. Students come in for assistance with organization, help with math homework, or general assistance with their classroom assignments. The Study Center is constantly bustling and has quickly become a safe and caring space to seek assistance.

This year, we have been fortunate to further expand the services that we provide to students. The Writing Center, which opened last week, is new to Bishop Kelly. Mrs. Armuth and her peer consultants are available to students every day before school, at lunch and after school. Appointments can be made at bk.mywconline.com. Peer-to-peer support is very powerful and we are excited to have this brand new resource! We have also added Tim Brennan as a Dean of Students, an additional counselor and created a beautiful new space for them to meet with students.

In addition to the Study Center and New Writing Center, there are many support services available at the center of our school including, Father Fraser Library, Counseling Center, Technology Support Center, Campus Ministry Room, and now Father Vance is also centrally located and accessible to all of our students.

Build stronger student-counselor relationships / Implement new counseling center

It has been an exciting start to the school year. Opening the school year with a new centralized counseling center, an additional counselor and an eagerness to build community has ignited a whirlwind of student activity. To date, our counselors have had one on one meetings with each of the freshmen and seniors in their respective cases with plans to meet one on one with all other students in the coming months. Outside of the counseling office, you can find our new counseling staff in the classroom, giving presentations on college and career activities, providing mental health resources to students, and conducting professional development sessions for faculty and staff. Community time has also been an opportunity to build the student counselor relationship. On any given community day, counselors are engaged and building relationships with students and can be found playing cards games with students, coordinating backyard games or watching movies. We are tracking student use of the new counseling center and to date have had over 1200 student visits to the counseling center.

COVID-19 at BK

We are continuing to track and publish our school data on BK.org daily. As of today, 10/29/21, we have had 52 positive student and 9 staff cases since the start of school ten weeks ago, with 2 student and 0 staff member cases added this week. None of the cases to date have been due to spread within our school to our knowledge. We currently have no students or staff members out in quarantine. Student attendance remains strong at 95+% and staff absences for illness have been very low this week.

As mentioned in last week’s BK ALive letter, should these positive trends in our internal metrics continue and the external environment for COVID-19 continue to improve, we are hopeful and have begun planning for the relaxation of our mitigation measures in the coming weeks. We are looking at going back to how we started the school year with masks optional but encouraged. We believe this is possible with our high vaccination rates and natural immunity here at BK, the Delta variant less present in our communities, and other mitigation factors we have and will keep in place. However, we are not yet ready to commit until we see continued progress and have sufficient time to plan and communicate the changes.

In the meantime, let’s continue to work together to prevent the spread of COVID-19, keeping our families safe and our kids in school for face-to-face learning and playing sports, and helping our health care systems. Please maintain your efforts on proper indoor mask wearing outside of school, staying home when sick, considering being vaccinated if you/your child are not already, discouraging sleepovers, movie nights, and car pools, and being kind, civil, understanding and respectful to our BK team and to each other. We all want the same thing - our kids in school for face-to-face learning. Every day. Safely. And the better we can do all these things working together, we stand the best chance of making this happen, potentially with optional masks as early as two weeks from now.

Update on BK President Search

This is Laura Alvarez Schrag, Chairperson of the Bishop Kelly Board of Governance. As I am certain you are all aware by now, Rich Raimondi will be leaving his role as president of Bishop Kelly High School on June 30, 2022, after serving for the past 12 years.

I wanted to accomplish two things with this email - one, update you on the search process for Rich’s replacement; two, share how we are gathering input to help the BK Board select the next president of BK.

At our BK Board meeting this past Monday, we finalized the updated job description, determined the Search Committee (a subset of the Board), and affirmed the following timeline with targeted dates for completion of each stage:

First week of November - job is posted with close date of December 13th
December 6th Board meeting - selection committee provides update to BK Board
December 13th through January 15th - selection committee reviews applicants, does phone screening and makes recommendation on final candidates to interview
January 18th Board meeting - BK Board reviews selection committee recommendations and determines next steps
January 24th - February 25th - interviews take place on BK campus
February 28th BK Board meeting - Board reviews the recommendation of the search committee for next BK president
Early March - announcement of next BK president
April - June - begin transition (if possible)
July 1 - new BK president in place

Regarding involvement in the process, we will be focusing first and foremost on gathering feedback from our faculty, staff and Board of Governance, beginning the week of October 25th and going through late November. The Search Committee, with assistance from Kathy Opp of H2O Solutions, will gather input on what they see as the critical skills, experience and qualifications for our next BK president through 1:1 meetings, listening sessions, and a survey.

On behalf of the Board, we recognize the significant responsibility we have been bestowed and are all committed to be fully engaged and diligent in identifying our next BK President. We ask that you keep us in your prayers throughout this process.

I want to take this opportunity to thank Rich Raimondi for his leadership over the past 12 years. He has been instrumental in continuing to strengthen and grow Bishop Kelly High School. Rich has had countless accomplishments and contributions over the years. One of the most significant contributions which will continue to live on, is his leadership in creating the culture we have all come to know as The BK Way. Rich demonstrates daily what it means to live by The BK Way.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Rich’s leadership over the past 18-24 months. He has led with great courage, integrity, and compassion. On behalf of the Board, I want to acknowledge the tremendous job Rich has done in navigating and leading our school and community through such challenging and uncertain times. We are grateful to have him continuing to lead the way.

Please let me or Amy Eisele, the BK Director of HR, know if you have any questions or comments on this process. Thank you for your support of Bishop Kelly.

God bless,

Laura

Final Thoughts

We continue to be grateful for our community and the efforts we have all put in together - students, teachers, staff, and parents - to make this such a successful start to the school year. Thank you for your support, understanding, feedback, and trust.

God bless,

Rich Raimondi

President

Mike Caldwell

Principal

Reflections from Father Vance

My week has been dominated by two intense experiences, one good and one bad. Wanting always to end my reflections on a positive note, let me explain the bad experience first. On Monday afternoon, the school went into a “shelter in place” order in response to the active shooter at the Boise Towne Square Mall. As we have since learned, two innocent people lost their lives in this tragedy, the suspect has also died, and three others were injured, including a Boise Police Officer. But in those moments on Monday afternoon, all that we yet knew was that shots were being fired in close proximity to our campus, and that we needed to do everything in our power to keep our community safe and secure.

Over the last 30 years, I have unfortunately been part of school administrations during blizzards, ice storms, earthquakes and bomb threats. In all of these crises, I have been heartened and edified to see the care and professionalism of the various faculties and staffs as they have worked hard and even sacrificed their own security to ensure the safety of students. The same held true here at BK on Monday afternoon. But as I stood at the front doors of the school, trying to be a calming presence as we released the kids, I think I saw a look in their faces that I have not seen before -- fear for their lives. The sad reality of the last 30 years is that times have changed, and we seem to exist in a much more dangerous and violent world than we used to. The experience has left me asking God the question I’m sure many of us ask -- what have we come to? What is wrong with our world, and how can we hope to fix it?

By way of wonderful contrast, on Sunday afternoon, I celebrated the first of what I hope will be many “Partnership Masses.” This is a new initiative this year, where I go to a parish and say one of the weekend Masses, preaching about the good things that are going on here at Bishop Kelly. Most importantly, I want to lift up and encourage the students and families from that parish who sacrifice so much in order to come to our school. I began this project at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, and at the 5 p.m. Mass on Sunday, we had between 70-75 BK students attend. It was a wonderful celebration, and as so often happens, I find that I am incapable of wiping the huge smile from my face during and after Mass.

The reality of my psyche is that I don’t want the challenging experiences in life, only the good and heartening ones. But the reality of my faith is that God is a part of both kinds of life experiences, and I am called by that same God to seek His message in the tragedies of life as much as I seek His message in the celebrations of life. So, when I have a week marked by dramatic examples of both, I am led to a prayer that seeks God in all of it -- the good and the bad, the difficult and the joyful. And what has emerged for me is a simple lesson, an old lesson, but a lesson that seems particularly important in this time: EVERY MOMENT IS PRECIOUS. In each unfolding moment of our lives, we have an opportunity to make choices that express our deepest faith in God. When something happens to us or to others that defies our explanation and challenges us with tragedy, can we still worship God? When something happens to us or to others that makes our hearts soar with joy, can we worship God? When we look at someone with whom we disagree or who sees the world differently than we do, can we still see someone made in God’s image and likeness? And finally, can we recognize in each moment we are given on this earth and with one another an unrepeatable and precious opportunity to do each of these other things? Our call as Christians is nothing short of this.

We pray for those whose lives were lost and impacted this week in a senseless act of violence. We pray for young people struggling to live faith in a world that too often doesn’t support faith. And we pray that all of us can see and understand what a blessing it is to be together here at BK. May God charge our present with significance and grace, so that we don’t fear our future.

Confirmation Classes at BK!

St. Mary's Church, led by Father Worster, will hold Confirmation Classes at Bishop Kelly. This is open to any St. Mary's Parishioner or any student that is unaffiliated with a parish.

Classes will take place in the morning, before the start of school. Classes will begin in January.

If your student is interested, please complete This Google Form so that St. Mary's may get in touch with you.

Knights of the Week

Each week Bishop Kelly faculty and staff nominate students, and students nominate faculty and staff, who have demonstrated the BK Way attributes of Faith, Safe and Caring Place, Academic Excellence, Activities, Honor, Generosity, Community, and Partnership.

Congratulations to this week's Knights of the Week!

Marques McFadden

Honor, Generosity

Marques McFadden is outstanding Attendance Aid. He is super helpful, respectful, and always willing to help with any task. He takes his job seriously and greets students and parents in a genuine friendly manner. Thank-you Marques!

Matthew Martino

Activities

This past weekend Matthew competed at the U15 Pan-American Games and won two Gold Medals for Team USA!!! He was nominated as the Most Outstanding Wrestler of the Greco tournament!

Matthew will be dominant this year as a Freshman and a very strong addition to our talented BK Wrestling team making this season a must watch.

BK Staff of the Week

Ms. Colleen Aver

Activities, Safe and Caring Place

Ms. Aver is one of the funniest teachers at BK! She's always making jokes, making it fun in class, and getting to know all of us! Always puts a smile on mine and our class's faces!
Ms. Aver is awesome and I look forward to her lifetime fitness class everyday. She makes everything fun, and I love that I can talk to her about anything. Her field trips are really fun too, and you can tell she really cares about her students.
Ms. Aver makes her community class feel like a safe place. She is a friendly face around the school who you can trust. I think we all see her more as a friend than a teacher.
Ms. Aver is a very joyous individual and I am very glad to be in her class. She represents a safe and caring place for BK students. She is a very fun person and makes PE a fun environment.

Bishop Kelly Theatre Arts Presents

DRACULA

Lucy is suffering from a strange illness. When Count Dracula pays a call, Dr. Seward and his colleague, Professor Van Helsing, suspect the horrible truth. Then, it is a desperate race to save Lucy and others from Dracula's evil clutches.

Family friendly with a few spooky scenes.

MASKS REQUIRED for audience members and at all times indoors at Bishop Kelly.

Tickets: $7.50 General Admission,

$6.50 for those under age 6 and over age 65

Purchase Tickets Here for Friday, October 29th at 7:00 PM

Purchase Tickets Here for Saturday, October 30th at 7:00 PM

Purchase Tickets Here for Halloween! Sunday, October 31st at 2:00 PM

TIcket links can be found on the Theatre Arts Page.

2021 Winner's Choice Dinner & Auction

We are only 8 days away from the 2021 Knight's on the Range Dinner and Auction and in our final stages of planning. Tickets are almost SOLD OUT! Sunday October 31st, is your last day to buy tickets but act fast to be sure to get yours before they are gone.

Want a sneak peak of all of our Live Auction packages up for bid at this year's event? Head over to https://bkf2021.ggo.bid/bidding/package-browse and check out all of the fabulous packages! Don't miss the trip to Belize for 8 people with a private villa and private chef (and more!), the golf trip to Bandon Dunes, and of course our mini Goldendoodle!