Making An Indelible Mark

Our motto is “Faith Leads Us Beyond Ourselves,” and in case you missed it, over the last month, local papers have run three extraordinary stories about members of our senior class. I want to bring them to your attention:

Grace Wood went to Uganda with Michael Koen and Christian Cook in their junior year and did service work at an orphanage. The orphanage was necessary in this particular village because many of the adults there died from AIDS. At the orphanage, Grace, Michael and Christian met a little girl who had an umbilical hernia protruding from her stomach, and Grace talked to her family about sponsoring the girl to have surgery to get it fixed, and they did so. Had this little girl not met our students, doctors predicted the hernia would have ruptured and killed her. So I think it’s literally true that they saved this young girl’s life. 

Grace was so touched by her experience that she decided to go back to Uganda last summer. You were very generous in helping Grace raise monies—over $1800—which then helped her purchase goats for the villagers there. Goats are very important because they provide milk for the villagers, and so even after Grace returned back to us, she is continuing to have an impact on that village.  You can read more about all this here:

http://dioceseofnashville.com/news/trip-to-uganda-focuses-high-school-senior-on-life-of-service-  And read an earlier story here:

http://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2014/01/22/uganda-trip-teaches-lessons-to-jpii-students-families/4723293/

Anna Veazey also went to Uganda through a different program with her father and members of her Church. They visited several villages, helping people get eyeglasses whose eyesight was affected by malaria. During her stay, Anna befriended a little boy who had no parents, and Anna learned he had no shoes and had to walk to school a great distance each day.  After being with this boy for a few days, Anna noticed he was getting sick, so she took him to the local clinic, where he was diagnosed with malaria. Had she not noticed, doctors believe this boy would have died, so Anna, too, literally saved this boys’ life, and continues to sponsor this boy, sending money once/month for medication, food and clothing.

Anna, like Grace, has been so touched by her experience she’ll be going to Haiti this month and hopes to help Haitian farmers raise chickens, so they can provide chicken to the orphanages and schools and give the kids protein in their diet. She talked about this earlier this year with you and sought your help. If you can give more to assist her in this noble effort, I am sure it’s not too late. Anna, when do you leave?  You can read more here:

http://hendersonvillestandard.com/senior-anna-veazey-reaches-beyond-the-halls-of-jpii-cms-7604

And then, in this week’s Registrar, there is the story about the senior class project. Through an organization known as “Special Spaces,” the seniors decided to do a “dream room makeover” for a 13 year old girl they learned about through Vanderbilt Hospital suffering from leukemia.  Seniors raised the money, then worked with contractors to do a complete makeover of the room as a gift to the girl.  You can read more about this fantastic service work here:

http://dioceseofnashville.com/news/jpii-seniors-give-sick-girl-her-dream-bedroom

I can’t tell you how proud I am to be headmaster at a school that has students like you doing such amazing things for people all over the world, literally. You are living out the gospel command “Whatever you do to the least of these, you do unto me.” You are making your lives matter to others. You are making an indelible mark. 

I encourage more of you to follow the lead of these amazing seniors Maybe you can’t travel abroad, but you can make an extraordinary difference in the way you tackle your Christian service, the service you give in your churches, how you help out with youth in your Church, or in your neighborhood.  We can all make our mark in this world if we have the courage to take that first step.

Bravo, seniors. Bravo, JPII.

Top Ten Reasons To Choose Catholic Schools

Happy National Catholic Schools Week! As we celebrate the achievements of our Catholic schools here in Nashville and across the nation, I thought you might be interested in my “Top Ten Reasons to Choose Catholic Schools” (or keep your kids there!): 

10. Academics—Extensive research over the last three decades indicates that students from Catholic schools score very well compared to students in other systems, even when relevant demographic characteristics of the students are controlled, such as educational level of parents and family income. Students in our diocese score consistently higher, by a wide margin, than the national averages.

9. Positive Effects on Minorities—The differences in outcomes are even more pronounced for minority students attending Catholic schools compared to private schools, according to Dr. William Sander, an economics professor at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois in his book, Catholic Schools: Private and Social Effects (Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers, November 2000). “African-Americans and Hispanics have gained the most from Catholic schooling," wrote Sander. "They have substantially higher levels of educational attainment and academic achievement when they attended Catholic schools."

8. Organizational Structure: A basic tenet of Catholic social teaching is that things ought to be handled at the lowest level possible, known as the “principle of subsidiarity.” Thus dioceses delegate tremendous authority and responsibility to local principals and school boards, allowing them to establish policies and procedures that work for each school. This, in turn, gives the school community a real sense of ownership for the school, with the ability to affect change where change is needed. This principle also allows Catholic schools to keep costs down, as more monies go directly into instruction when compared to systems with large central office bureaucracies. 

7. Combatting Religious Amnesia--We live in a world that has grown immune to a sense of wonder and God’s active presence in our lives. Catholic schools help children (and their parents!) develop a sacramental world view in which God’s love and guidance are interpreted and invoked for the routine events of our lives. “Let us remember that we are in the presence of God” serves as the context for all Catholic schooling. 

6. Understanding our Intellectual Tradition—Beyond the common prayers, songs and vocabulary, students in Catholic high schools are given a glimpse into an impressive intellectual tradition as shaped by some of the greatest minds of our Western heritage. They begin to see Catholic theology as a whole cloth, rather than as a series of fragmented teachings or series of isolated propositions. 

5. Service to Others— The more affluent we become, the less inclined we are to empathize with the needs of the less fortunate. Catholic schools give students myriad opportunities for service, helping students live out the gospel enjoinder that “Whatsoever you do to the least of them, you do unto me”. 

4.  Credible Role Models: Though there are extraordinary Christians who teach and work in other school systems, they are not allowed to make their faith explicit to their kids, nor show the direct connection between their faith, what they do and why. When teenage boys watch their coaches worship with them at school Masses, for example, they sense that being Christian isn’t just a feminine thing (always their suspicion) in a way that trumps all preaching. 

3. Development of a Catholic World View—The Catholic faith is not designed to be a “Sunday thing” but a way of life.  Prayer and opportunities for worship are so commonplace in Catholic schools (morning announcements, before games, before class, before tests, during weekly masses, etc.) that they become “natural,” almost unnoticed, like breathing.

2. An Integrated Family Life--Catholic schools offer their families the chance for an integrated life—where school, the practice of faith, the extra-curricular life of our children, who their friends are, who OUR friends are, and the experiences we share together, can all become part of a whole, and not remain distinct, disconnected fragments that we must juggle. Given the centrifugal forces confronting our families, this integration is a great blessing. 

1. Catholic Religious Identity and Long Term Practice of Faith—Through common songs, prayers and liturgical practices learned in Catholic schools, students become united in a common vocabulary, memory and tradition that bind them to a community life. In a recent study, “millennials” who attend Catholic elementary school or high school are almost seven and eight times more likely, respectively, to attend Sunday Mass each week than those who attend neither. (Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, Georgetown University, June 2014).

Please help us celebrate Catholic Schools Week by praying for our students, teachers, pastors and principals, that we may remain faithful to our fundamental calling to lead students to Christ. If you’re a parent of young children, please consider us for your child! If you’re already a parent in our school, be an ambassador—what you say to your friends and co-workers means much more than what we say about ourselves in promotional materials! And if your children are grown or you don’t have kids, consider giving the gift of a Catholic education to a grandchild, family member, neighbor or friend by assisting his or her family with tuition. You will make, literally, an eternal difference in that child’s life!

Happy Catholic Schools Week, everyone!

Claim it!

Address to students

In my previous school, if you were late, you had to come to my office and sign in, write why you were late next to your name and explain it to me if I happened to be standing there. The excuses were pretty entertaining.  Apparently, they don’t make very good alarm clocks in this country, because “my alarm clock didn’t work” was a favorite excuse. “Traffic,” of course, was up there, and if I didn’t know differently, the cars our students drove must have been real clunkers because “my car wouldn’t start” was frequently cited. Older brothers often blamed their sisters: “Mr. Weber, my sister takes forever to get ready for school; I have no idea what she’s doing in the bathroom for so long.”  And there’s not much loyalty to mom either: “My mother didn’t wake me up in time,” or even, “I’d have been here on time if Mom drove faster.” I once had a kid swear he got three flat tires on his way to school, each at different points along the way.

You’ll notice a common theme in all of these excuses: “It’s not my fault.” It’s pretty rare for someone to come in late and say, “I just got started too late today,” or “ I woke up too late,” or  “I’d knew I’d be late, but I was hungry and stopped off for some fast food on my way in to school.”

It’s not just true of your generation—it’s true for adults as well. Take for example, a seemingly straightforward statement: “I didn’t have time to do it.”  If we were being more honest with ourselves, what we should REALLY say is “It wasn’t a priority.” Proof of that is that if someone offered us ten thousand dollars to get whatever it was done, we’d drop everything else and do it. But they didn’t, and so we judged other things in our lives as more important that getting this one thing done.

In one form or the other, it's common to hear those in schools say: “Yes, we know our schools are bad, but you get what you pay for,” and the “public doesn’t support our schools”, so  “Our hands are tied. “ Do you see how neatly that passes the blame to someone else—in this case, the taxpayers?

It’s easy, too, to play the victim by passing blame up the ladder in an organizational structure. A coach, or a teacher, or a lieutenant in the military, or a person in a middle management position might be apt to blame their bosses, or the anonymous “administration” or the “man upstairs” for their lack of success at whatever his or her job is.

The problem is whenever we pass blame to someone else or something else, we surrender a little piece of ourselves to them, giving up our own authority and power to fix it ourselves, making us weaker.  We tell our bosses we are unable to tackle our own problems and in effect, ask them to fix our problems for us. 

People who work in drug or alcohol treatment centers understand this.  The first step in the twelve-step program to overcome addiction is the most difficult, these professionals say. That step is for the addict to say, clearly, without blaming anyone else, “My name is ____ and I am an addict." "I am ___ and I am an alcoholic.” If an alcoholic can say that, admitting they don't have the power to control their drinking, then he or she is on the path to recovery. But they have to claim it. Own it.  Admit it to themselves and to others. It’s the step many alcoholics can never take.

Some of you may know that I’ve been speaking to a number of students and their parents about poor performance in the first semester, outlining what has to happen this semester, attending tutorials, doing homework, etc. At the beginning of those meetings, I usually ask the student “What happened?” Again, it’s very tempting for the student to blame the school, the subject matter ("it's too hard"),  the teacher, or someone else. But in one of those meetings, the young man looked me right in the eye and said “Mr. Weber, I just didn’t work very hard. I didn’t turn stuff in. It wasn’t the teacher, or the school, and it wasn’t that the work was too hard. It was me. “ I was very impressed by this fella, and my guess is, he's going to be OK this semester. 

God didn’t make us perfect—we’re going to screw up from time to time. That’s a given. But what’s not a given—what distinguishes the mature person from the immature--is how we handle our screw-ups. When we do something wrong or poorly, let’s man up and say  “I am sorry; I made a mistake.”  That’s our best chance for not making the same mistake again. And the truth is, people will respect us more for the fact we’re owning our own problems and not expecting them to solve them for us. 

May we all have the courage to claim what is ours!