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Being able to work in a Catholic School is such a gift of God. Like many of you, at Holy Family we get to see the gifts of the Spirit each day. Much of this is shown in the relationships our students have with their teachers and how the sense of community is built. Our Catholic mission calls us to evangelize and to help our students understand their faith more fully. We work to achieve this through acts of service and devotional practices (i.e.,  recitation of the Rosary, honoring our Lady of Guadalupe, learning and understanding what Advent and Lent are about), and we do this through prayer, catechesis, and our acts of love for one another.
 
Every day, we have the chance to pray for each other, to be fully present at school mass with our students and our Parish Community and to be intentional about who we need to pray for. We are always leaning into ways to create a stronger connection with God. 

In the Mission Playbook it states:
God created us in his image and likeness, which means we can know, and we can love. When we grow in what we know and how to love, we become more like God: to understand deeply, to come to know things well.

Each day, we model and work our very best for the greater Glory of God. Our Catholic schools are designed not only to teach what love means but how we grow in our faith as well. Prayer is essential to this growth, and it is a joy walking by classrooms and hearing the recitation of prayers such as the Apostle's Creed, the St. Michael the Archangel, the Angel of God, or our lunch prayer (just to list a few).

As I further reflect upon our role within Catholic Education, I get to experience and see our strongest witnesses--our teachers--who model our deep devotion to Jesus Christ. As a result of their continual transformation of faith, their witness to Christ becomes stronger. 
 
Our teachers give of their time, they commit to creating a true community, and finally resolve to help guide our students to be the best version of themselves.  I am beyond blessed to work with a staff who put our students first in thought, word and deed.
Over the past several months, I have seen the teachers engaged in the mission of Catholic education in multiple ways. Besides teaching the priority standards for religion to our students, our teachers are also introducing and helping our students comprehend the virtues. We devote a month to a specific virtue and we tie these to our School wide expectations.  Each Advent and Lent, we gather as a school, in the mail hallway to pray, as a student body, a morning prayer and a prayerful response that the students then recite. Having all our students gathered together, we are truly present not only for each other but for the greater glory of God.
  
Furthermore, we take the time as a school to pray the Rosary as a school. We gather in the Church, we gather in the gym, or we gather outside on our playground where a grade level will be responsible for a specific mystery and decade of the rosary.  Also during Lent, our school attends the Stations of the Cross and we have a specific grade level that performs the living stations of the cross.

We look at these opportunities as ways of enhancing our faith and I am ever so grateful for the conscientious work that the teachers do every day. God Bless our teaching staff.