Next week is one of the most important and exciting weeks on our campus: Catholic Schools Week. All across the country, Catholic education will be celebrated with various events, liturgies, and activities that help commemorate the significant accomplishments and impact that these schools have on a daily basis.

As of this year, there are currently just under 7,000 Catholic schools in our nation, serving over 2,000,000 students each day. In Oregon, there are 40 Catholic schools serving students in grades K-8 and 10 Catholic high schools.

These stats are meant to help demonstrate the enormous impact that Catholic schools have both in our country and locally. This year’s Catholic Schools Week theme of “Faith. Academics. Service.” is very appropriate to our campus at Valley Catholic. Each day our students, faculty, staff and parents help us carry out the mission of the Sisters of St. Mary of Oregon by making faith, academics, and service our priorities.

There are various events on campus for the coming week to help celebrate Catholic Schools Week, highlighted by the all-school Mass on Wednesday, Feb. 1 at 9:25 a.m. in the Valiants’ Gym. This gathering will be a terrific display of Catholic education at work on our campus. At the conclusion of the Mass, I will be announcing our Distinguished Alumni Award winner for the year. This award has been given out on various occasions in the past, but we are now establishing it as part of our annual Catholic Schools Week celebration.

I hope that each of our families can find a way to celebrate this special week on our campus. I know that without parents, Catholic schools would not exist or be as successful. At Valley Catholic, we are very grateful for our parent community and we look forward to this very special week.

A great way to kick off your Catholic Schools Week activities would be to attend Saturday night’s Family Mass and Banquet. I hope to see many of you on Saturday night.

Finally, I wanted to follow up on last week’s announcement of the tuition rates for the 2012-2013 school year. I appreciate the feedback I have received since last week’s announcement and I wanted to clarify one area that was brought up to me. The registration fee for students will not increase. The amount was raised last year to the current rate of $200 per student. Before last year’s increase, this fee had not increased in several years and I do not anticipate the fee increasing from its current rate of $200 for the next several years.

As always, please let me know if you have any questions about this information and I will get back to you as quickly as possible. Enjoy your weekend and I hope to see you on campus soon.

Posted by Danielle Tomich in VCS Home Page