April 26, 2015
Dear St. Raphael School Families and Parishioners,
First I’d like to congratulate all of our 2nd Grade students as they receive the Sacrament of First Holy Communion this Sunday. Monsignor Breier, Miss Stephanie Amsler, 2nd Grade parents, and 2nd Grade students have been working hard to prepare for this special day, and we are all very proud of them! It is such a blessing to have this beautiful sacrament held on Sunday with members of the parish - it truly helps us to see that we are all a part of the Body of Christ.
School families should have received an email invitation to complete a survey this week, asking for your feedback on the standards-based grading system and report cards that we implemented at the beginning of this current school year. I hope you will take the time to complete the survey; we want your feedback to help us improve. The teachers and I have experienced both successes and some problems with the new system, as was expected in the first year. With your help we can make improvements for students, parents, and teachers for 2015-2016.
That brings me to my main message this week, and that is Continuous School Improvement. When I first arrived at St. Raphael, one of the School Board members at that time told me that her vision was for St. Raphael to become a Blue Ribbon School. I heard that same desire from numerous other parents. The Blue Ribbon School award is given each year to a small number of schools nationally that offer rigorous academic programs and achieve excellent academic results. It’s quite an honor and difficult to obtain. I talked a lot that first year about changes that would have to be made at St. Raphael in order to become a Blue Ribbon School. While the Blue Ribbon distinction is a wonderful goal, the meat and potatoes behind it involves improving teacher performance and student learning. So the real goals are to develop our teaching faculty into the very best teachers they can be, and to take steps to help our students learn as well as they possibly can. This is School Improvement.
There’s a saying that the definition of Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, but expecting different results. And so it is with school improvement. In order to produce the kind of change that was being asked for at St. Raphael, it required that we change some things, actually lots of things. We’ve changed schedules, classrooms, teaching assignments, teacher expectations, student groupings, lesson planning, instructional strategies, technology, policies and procedures, professional development for teachers, grading systems, assessments, report cards, expectations for students, implementation of accommodations for students who learn differently...get the idea? You name it, and we’ve probably changed it. Why? Because we are doing Continuous School Improvement. Because we must change the way we do things here if we want different results for our students. Has every change been successful? No, of course not. But in this environment of Continuous School Improvement, we are evaluating our results constantly. And we are tweaking our outlooks, systems and strategies to better our results for students.
Will we ever be named a Blue Ribbon School? I honestly don’t know. But I do know that everything we are doing at St. Raphael is an attempt to make us the best school that we can be, and to help our students become the best learners that they can be. And I am very proud of what our teachers and students have accomplished so far.
Looking Ahead…
Monday, April 27th NO SCHOOL for 2nd Grade and 6th Grade leaves for Camp
Tuesday, April 28th 4th Grade Dred Scott Field Trip and 5th Grade at BizTown
Thursday, April 30th Chess Club 3:15-4:15pm
Friday, May 1st Special School Mass, St. Joseph the Worker, 3rd Grade
Peace,
Kim Vangel
Principal