From Principal's Remarks at Parent Awareness Night: August, 2010

Dear St. George Families,

"OMG! It’s PA! Oh my God, it’s Parent Awareness Night!"

Before I make a couple of brief statements I would ask Fr. Ken to come up and pray with and utter some pearls of wisdom afterwards.

I’d like to welcome our Returning Families and offer a very warm welcome to our new families. New Families, please stand so we can give you a real St. George Welcome.

We begin our school year with some of the old challenges and have been making prepa¬rations to meet the new ones. The federal government-No Child Left Be¬hind, the Illinois State Board of Education with its standards, and the Office of Catholic Schools in their Genesis Program have issued standards and goals so that our stu¬dents will be better prepared to live in the 21 St Century.

Our teachers have been involved in various and different programs for their professional development. ¾ of our faculty have Master Degrees and one has two Master degrees. St. George School has an excellent and experienced faculty. We have been attending workshops and seminars. We have brought in speakers from the Archdiocese and brought in notable speakers. We have scheduled more of the same for this year. Our teachers have been certified as catechists in the Archdiocese after 4 years of training.

We’ll be using an early intervention program, RTI in Grades K-3 to identify struggling readers and next year we’ll be doing the same for in math. We intend to expand these programs into the 4 & 5 grades as well. We will be working with a consultant for the entire year on a process called curricu¬lum “Mapping”. We continue to work on Genesis. In order to make all our students feel safe we have adopted a whole new discipline system. You can find this in the Parent/Student Handbook. We are continually reviewing and revising our programs to accommodate each student’s needs.

I would like to stress the importance of parent involvement in this process. A day shouldn’t go by that you don’t ask what’s going on in school or sit down and help with homework and projects, even for the older junior high students-maybe especially for the older ones.

And lastly, if you haven’t been going to church each week with your children, do it.

Full uniforms on Monday, 7:45 am. Check the handbook for warm weather dress.

Let’s have a really great year.



God's blessing,

Ed Weston Principal