Mille grazie

In the spirit of "students first and always," I announced my upcoming retirement to your children after Mass this morning. Following is the text of that message, altered only slightly to include you!

I know that Thanksgiving has become the gateway to a generic season of celebrations known as “the holiday season,” but I’d like us to pause and think about how important it is as a stand-alone feast day.  And not only as a day, but as an opportunity to reflect on the idea that an everyday attitude of gratitude makes for a healthy and satisfying way of life.  Even research studies have shown that gratitude is strongly and consistently associated with greater happiness and greater health. 

And so, we put a reminder on our marquee sign out front to encourage the whole neighborhood to take the time to be grateful.  Have you noticed it?  It says “DO THE MATH: COUNT YOUR BLESSINGS.”

Well, I wanted set a good example, so I decided to do some math of my own to put a number to some of my blessings. I thought it would be fun to focus the lens of my gratitude this year very specifically on the blessings and privilege of leading this great school, so I needed to come up with some numbers to quantify that.  It didn’t take long to recognize that it’s the people God has entrusted to my care - the students and teachers and staff that I’ve worked for and with over the years - that are the greatest blessing of my work.  So I tried to figure out just how many students and staff have walked this journey with me over the 16 years of my principalship.  Here’s how I did it:

To figure out the number of students enrolled at St. Robert over the years of my leadership, I started with the enrollment of the school in my first year as principal. Then I added the new 4K students that came each year after that, plus 15 transfer students a year (which was our average through the 2019-2020 school year).  For last year and this year, when we had an unusually large number of transfer students, I used the actual number.  My math yielded a grand total of 993 students.  

Then I calculated teachers and staff by starting with our current staff and adding on everyone else who had been part of our team at some point since the fall of 2006.  That yielded 105 faculty and staff members.  Combining the number of students with the number of teachers and staff brought my grand total to 1,098 people.

A thousand people.  A thousand who’ve taught me and challenged me and loved me and inspired me.  A thousand gifts God has given me to care for, but who’ve ultimately made me who I am today...because while I was busy transforming the school, you were transforming me.

So here I stand like the Velveteen Rabbit.  A little worn out, but so much better.  Profoundly gifted.  Deeply grateful.

This will be my last year as the principal of St. Robert School.  I’ll be retiring at the end of the school year and I wanted a chance to tell my students personally even before I sent this message to you, their parents (who I opted to leave out of my math purely to keep the message simple).  We’ll continue on and do our work and walk this last great mile together... But today, I’m inspired by my math to share an expression from my Italian grandma who often said, “I thank you a thousand times.”  Mille grazie.  A thousand thanks to Almighty God and to you for a thousand ways you’ve gifted me.

Do your own math.  And enjoy a happy Thanksgiving and the abundant blessings of a happy, holy life.

 

Pointing the Way

Several weeks into our office renovation project, an ancient wooden pointer revealed itself from a long-hidden place at the back of a closet shelf.  At first glance, it seemed a quant reminder of a bygone era to be tossed in the trash.  But then...could it be a providentially-revealed artifact that could point the way forward in trying times?

In the many long decades that the pointer was a classroom staple, teachers were the receptacles of the knowledge to be passed to a new generation.  The pointer was the central tool that focused whole-class attention on the information to be learned; that signaled call-and-response recitation of memorized facts from a body of knowledge that changed only glacially through the decades.  

But what of today?  Knowledge changes at lightning speed.  Our children can access information at the touch of a keystroke.  We are preparing them for a world in which they will need portable, flexible skills and the dispositions to think and solve problems we can’t even yet imagine. Likely, one day, they will even be called upon to create new knowledge.  Our educational currency has evolved over the past twenty years from facility with a finite body of facts to the ability to think critically.  And we can only bring this capacity to life in a new generation by nurturing it and modeling it, which is exactly what we did at our School Advisory Commission (SAC) meeting on the issue of masking Wednesday night.

Some weeks earlier, I was asked how I feel about masking. I replied that my feelings should be irrelevant. I am called as a leader to be well-informed, to triangulate data, to filter, to think; and, ultimately, to base decisions on facts and needs relevant to our mission.

The ever-evolving facts about our ever-evolving pandemic are dizzying. I have listened to competing truths, fears and rights, and to mountains of uncertainties.  But school starts in a week and we need to move forward. Our Healthy School Plan was developed in thoughtful response to insights, concerns and passions that have been shared and heard.  The decision framework that informed the 2021 iteration of our Plan was: 

• Grounded in mission

• Committed to a holistic view of child wellness

• Aimed at a proper balance between the competing realities of mission effectiveness and disease mitigation 

• Informed by experts in medicine, mental health, and parenting, and

• Born of critical thought

For the first time in my fifteen years of leadership, our SAC was unable to reach consensus on a key issue. Our parent community-at-large holds vastly opposing views on the value of masking their children; and, after hours of discussion, our SAC reflected this same division. Nonetheless, it was not really difficult to see the way forward through the murky darkness of chaos because shared values also resonated loudly.  We want our children in school.  We care.  Deeply.  In the end, every member of the Commission, every guest commenter, and every expert panel member contributed some bit of wisdom that became part of the whole.  And the whole is, indeed, so much greater than the sum of its parts.

It is, in truth, a heavy burden to bear responsibility for the safety of other people’s children while trying to engender the confident trust of a diverse community. Though we will not all agree on a single way to educate and care for our children during this pandemic, we hold diversity as a core value; "welcoming, accepting, and respecting the unique gifts of every person."  I hope you will see the wisdom and good that will come from respecting diversity of thought and loving each other through challenging times.  Our shared humanity is worth the effort. Let’s point the way.