On March 26th, the newly formed Education Commission met to begin discussions around the vision and purpose of Saint James School. 

Current membership of the commission includes Father Drew Olson (Parochial Administrator), Randall Enders (Principal), Amber Cerrato (Director of Discipleship and Strategy), Lauren McCall (Teacher, School Mom), Layna Macaulay (Teacher), Gladimar Escobar (Enrollment Coordinator, School Mom), Cecelia Klingele (School Mom), Carlos Lozano (School Dad), Leobardo Lagunas (School Dad),  and Tim Lehman (School Dad).

We began by asking the question, "Why do we exist?" This question will be followed by "How do we behave?", "What do we do?", and "How will we succeed?" The goal is to create a vision that can be used to help us make decisions about strategies, plans, and tactics in the future. 

We began by asking whether anyone could recite the current mission statement. All of us were unable to remember the statement or its key parts. The goal then, is not necessary to change it, but make the important parts of our mission memorable, actionable, and repeatable by breaking it down into these key questions. 

So we started by examining the question, "Why do we exist?"As Catholics all we do is directed toward "glorifying God and making disciples," this is why we were put on this earth and given the gift of baptism. We first began to drill deeper into what it is that we do that makes us different from the pastorate and different from other non-Catholic schools. Discussion was good and contentious at times as we discussed the difference between "education" and "formation, the place of the word "Catholic" within the answer to this first question, the use of the word "together" to signify our collaboration with families, and the inclusion of phrases like "virtue" or "whole person." 

We did not yet come to a final conclusion and answer to this question, but we made some good ground and plan to wrap up this question at our next meeting on April 9th in the library at Saint James. You can find notes here.