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Students attend college for intellectual pursuits in fields of study to achieve a job. The fact that young adult Catholics are leaving the faith bothered David Delio, Ph.D.

Again this year, the Clarion Herald invited Catholic elementary and high schools  to submit the names of teachers with at least 25 years of service who retired at the end of the 2018-19 academic year. Here are a few of their pearls of wisdom:

Mount Carmel Academy has gained 29,000 square feet of instructional space with the recent purchase of the motherhouse and the land it and the school sit on from the Sisters of Mount Carmel.

More than two dozen graduates of Catholic elementary and high schools were recently honored as “Distinguished Alumni” at a brunch and award ceremony at St. Philip Neri’s parish center. After an opening prayer, Archbishop Gregory Aymond thanked the honorees, who were nominated by their school communities, for witnessing to the values of Catholic education into adulthood.

Dr. Tracy Bonday, J.D., M.S. Ed, who served from 2015-19 as superintendent of Catholic schools in the Diocese of Des Moines, Iowa, and led a strategic planning initiative to maintain the longtime viability of Catholic schools, has been named head of the high school division of Ursuline Academy.

Yvette Fouchi remembers sitting in the chapel at Notre Dame Seminary and feeling “terrified” she had bitten off more than she could chew. At the encouragement of her daughter and a priest friend, she had enrolled in the seminary’s graduate-level program designed to help the laity explore and deepen their faith while developing their practical skills as leaders in ministry.

May 8 marked a significant moment in the history of Pope John Paul II High School in Slidell. At the school’s 39th annual graduation ceremony, nine of its 62 graduates – a record number – were children of PJP alumni.

The purpose of Catholic education is to provide each student with a unique encounter with Christ by means of his or her formal schooling. Catholic education has the obligation to balance faith and reason by developing the whole child: mind, body and soul. Through this formation, Catholic education not only seeks to yield productive citizens of society but also, more importantly, to form faithful and merciful servants of the church.

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“Everyone has someone they know with special learning needs,” said Kirsch J. Wilberg, principal of Our Lady of Perpetual Help School in Belle Chasse.

On Nov. 22, 1963, a few months into Sister Dominic Savio Estorge’s inaugural year of teaching freshman English at St. Mary’s Dominican High, a heart-stopping report came over the P.A. from school principal Sister Mary Damian Cazale: President John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.

I would like to thank each of you for the support you have given to our Catholic school community. I would also like to thank you for being so welcoming in my first year as superintendent. I look forward to continuing our work together.  This first year had its fair share of challenges. We witnessed multiple, heart-wrenching storms impacting our neighbors to the east and west, devastating deaths in our community, the challenges that came with getting our pilot programs started, and the threatened loss of non-public school funding from the state. However, with great challenge comes great opportunity, and I am proud of the manner in which our Catholic school community responded. During the 2018 legislative session, we faced the possibility of losing all state funding for non-public schools. Given the complexities of the situation, I believe we fared as well as we could have hoped for. Required services sustained a cut of approximately 10 percent, but the school lunch program supplement was fully funded. In addition, the TOPS program was fully funded. While TOPS does not affect Catholic schools, it significantly impacts our high school graduates. Lastly, the Louisiana Scholarship Program was fully funded. 

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Loyola University New Orleans has opened a state-of-the-art, $1.2 million donor-funded Student Success Center that brings together services previously offered in various parts of the campus. Strategically located on the second floor of the J. Edgar and Louise S. Monroe Library, a major hub on campus, the new center emphasizes Loyola’s roles as a center of academic excellence and a place of welcome for all students. The first year of college is critical for retention of students, and Loyola officials say the new center will be an important part of that success rate, which has been steadily on the rise over the last two years.

Catholics in the United States have excelled in developing amazing structures and resources for pastoral leadership formation at all levels in seminaries, houses of formation, colleges and universities, pastoral institutes, online programs and catechetical formation initiatives, among others.  After visiting Catholic communities in several parts of the world, I get the sense that no other nation has as many highly educated and well-qualified Catholic pastoral leaders as we do in the U.S. This reflects, in many ways, the social and cultural context within which we build faith communities, the importance given by our society to education and professional training, and the access to countless resources for education.  However, a large contingent of highly qualified pastoral leaders is not something that happens overnight. It took decades to educate them. Most of these well-formed pastoral leaders are white, Euro-American. 

More than a few tears are shed each year as children prepare to go back to school – or go to school for the first time. Last year, Riley Blanchard entered pre-K2 at St. Louis King of France in Metairie with some trepidation, as her class photo attests. “Every picture was of her crying,” said Marian Blanchard, Riley’s grandmother. “She cried when she took her bunny pictures; she cried when she took her Santa pictures.” But everything ended well. “Every grandmother thinks her grandchild is smart, but Riley amazes me!” Blanchard said.