August 2008 Welcome back to another school year! Summers are getting shorter and shorter, and this one was busier than ever. There was a lot of student activity on campus due to the summer camps. In addition, there were a lot of adults on campus this summer to help plan for a wonderful school year. The first thing I would like to do is to welcome three new additions to our staff: • Angela Carson is our new music teacher. She comes to us with a lot of experience, qualifications, and enthusiasm. She will be here three days a week (Monday-Wednesday) and is already thinking about our Christmas Program and other special events. We have changed our children’s mass schedule a little so she can have the younger children for mass and Ann Meinert can have the middle schoolers. (First and second grade will attend Monday’s mass; fifth and sixth will stay with Tuesday; third and fourth will attend on Wednesday; Thursday’s mass will be attended by seventh and eighth.) • Angelique Melton is our new middle school math teacher. She comes to us with two years experience in Walker County where she taught seventh grade science and integrated with the math. Her certification is in middle school and secondary math and science, and she just completed her Master’s program. She loves middle school students and has a lot of fresh ideas; she is as excited to be here as we are to have her. • Todd Harmon is our new band teacher. He is splitting his time between here and St. Jude and will be working under Jeff McIntosh at Notre Dame High School. He has been working at Cadek at UTC and is highly talented and qualified. He will be working here two days a week with 5th through 8th grade students. His schedule will be confirmed after we see how many students we have for him. (There will possibly be some conflicts with core classes, but we will work them out.) We are very excited to be able to offer this to our students again. When school ended last year, parents were notified of budget cuts to personnel. We needed to reconfigure to meet that budget item. This was the most difficult part of my summer. Maria Mantel and Mary Joyce Higgins decided not to come back this year. Their decisions helped me not to lay off any teachers, but it did create a very challenging situation. We solved part of it by getting a part time music teacher paid from outside funding. Therefore, we have two salaries off our payroll to meet the requirements of the budget. We moved Kellye Stolpmann to seventh grade language arts to fill that empty spot. Our classes in first, second, and fourth grade all had small numbers, and we have been monitoring those numbers all summer to see what to do with one less teacher in the elementary. Although small classes are ideal, too small of classes can not be justified nor are they always beneficial to the students. As it turned out, all three classes made some gains in population. A couple of weeks ago, it looked as if fourth grade would be the grade where we would make some creative decisions. We had a plan and notified the fourth grade parents of the plan. Of course there were a few questions and concerns, but we had great support from the parents. Then, August 4th everything changed. Enrollment was changing faster than I could keep up with it. But, in the end, we realized we could not go with our original plan. At 6:00 P.M. that evening I called teachers in for a meeting, and we came up with a different game plan, and the next day I sent it out to all of you, our parents, to keep you updated. My staff has been incredible in adjusting to this quick change and planning for the students. Mrs. Ingle has to change all the planning she has done this summer, because of her moving to a different grade level (second to fourth). Mrs. Pack is feeling like she is going through a divorce with the loss of Mrs. Ingle, but is adapting and planning accordingly. Ms. Stolpmann is again changing her plans to help Mrs. Pack with the 2nd grade reading; Mrs. Hetzler is reading everything she can get her hands on about math and is excited to be teaching math again; and, Ms. Sumrell is thrilled to pick up a religion class. OLPH is very fortunate to have such dedicated teachers who have so much passion and love for children that they go that extra mile to do what is best for their students. Also, this summer we started working on our strategic plan. Due to the concerns of our declining enrollment, a core group met to come up with a plan to help increase and maintain our wonderful school’s population. We will be making presentations and contacting all of you to attend input sessions. Please seriously consider to accept our invitations to attend these meetings. We need your input and your help to make OLPH the best Catholic School possible. We have begun updating our Fanfares for the school year. Please check the website, www.myolph.com, for weekly updates. Our Open House is planned for August 27. We are looking forward to a wonderful school year, and I am grateful for all of your support. God Bless, Jeri McInturff
