I'm sure that anyone who reads this already knows that both Mother of Sorrows and Cathedral's schools have closed and the kids are being sent to Holy Cross's newly opened parish school. I don't see how this can possibly be a good thing.
I went to Mother of Sorrows. My siblings go to Mother of Sorrows. It's really terrible to see it closing. There are also some factors that should be taken into consideration:
1) The elementary schools are considering making themselves k-5 instead of k-6 - This means that the 5th graders will be the big kids at their schools, which doesn't really work. 5th graders aren't exactly the age that kindergartners should be looking up to (I'm not insulting them, I was one once.)
2) That means that the junior highs will probably add a sixth grade. While I know this won't really apply to Aquinas, considering they have that whole Nazareth thing, but for other schools this could be really problematic. When I went to MOS, the teachers changed after all the school closings, a lot of the junior high teachers couldn't continue to teach at MOS because their certification didn't include 6th grade. I wouldn't be surprised if this applied to many of the junior high teachers at other schools, just further complicating things and losing jobs for people. Great.
3) Think of how the kids feel after all of this! They're hopping around from school to school, and eventually (if not already) they'll have no sense of belonging to anywhere. They won't really be able to look at one school and think, "Yeah, that's my school," because it'll be closed. That gets rid of the sense of togetherness that the kids have, because who knows if they'll be going to the same school as each other next year? It negatively affects their development.
Personally, I was already sad that there is no longer a MOS junior high for me to visit. Now there's not going to be a school at all. That place, as well as other schools, still means a lot to some people. The people who previously went to those schools still have fond memories of them, and closing the schools obliterate that. I was really looking forward to being older and seeing how MOS would have changed and how it would have stayed the same, but now that's impossible. I know that this isn't new, that it's been a fact since the closing of the 13 schools three years ago, but it's growing more and more apparent and widespread.
It seems like there's something bad that hugely affects the Catholic schools every year. I'm not looking forward to next year's.
Bishop Clark retires in 591 days, guys. Happy December.
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
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