Ursuline Update

Message from the President – Gretchen Z. Kane

The month of May is both named for and dedicated to Mary, Our Blessed Mother. Tomorrow, the Ursuline Academy elementary school will hold its traditional May Crowning in the National Shrine of Our Lady of Prompt Succor. The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains, “In prayer the Holy Spirit unites us to the person of the only Son, in His glorified humanity, through which and in which our filial prayer unites us in the Church with the Mother of Jesus. Beginning with Mary’s unique cooperation with the working of the Holy Spirit, the Churches developed their prayer to the holy Mother of God, centering it on the person of Christ manifested in His mysteries.”

Ave Maria
Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum.
Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus.
Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus,
nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

Hail Mary
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee!
Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners,
now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

On Saturday, May 5th, the Academy will welcome our new high school students for the 2012-13 academic year at a “New Student Welcome Day” scheduled from 9 a.m. until 11 a.m. Eighth and ninth graders new to the high school will spend their morning learning a little bit of Ursuline history as well as navigating the Academy campus. Thanks go to Mary Anteé, UA’s Director of Admissions, and the high school student council for coordinating this wonderful morning for our new high school students.

Please keep our senior class in your prayers as they enter into their final stages as students of Ursuline Academy. Today is the senior Macs last official day of classes. On Friday, seniors will celebrate Mass with the entire high school community for the last time and be honored with a host of awards for service activities and academic performance. It’s hard to believe their senior year is almost over. We are all so very grateful to the Macs of 2012 for their leadership in guiding the student body this year and for being models of our Ursuline ideals.

Message from the High School Principal – John Gabriel

This week’s The New Yorker has a fascinating article by Ken Auletta about Stanford University and its relationship with Silicon Valley. I was stunned to read Stanford’s endowment is nearly seventeen billion dollars (no, you read that number correctly; the amount really is $17,000,000,000.00) and there are more millionaire faculty members at Stanford than at any other university in the world. And I couldn’t believe the fact that students accepted at Stanford who come from families that make less than $100,000.00 attend the university for free, in keeping with Stanford’s philosophy that undergraduate students should not be burdened by undergraduate debt.

As impressed as I was by the wealth and resources of Stanford, my real interest in Auletta’s excellent piece, however, concerned Stanford’s educational philosophy, and in particular, the importance Stanford places on learning across the lines of academic disciplines. The university also asks its students to work on projects that can help mankind through specific applications of what the students have learned. One example of such a project comes from Stanford’s Institute of Design, where undergraduates were asked to develop a method for inexpensively extracting water out of the ground to be used for irrigation – in, of all places, Burma. After travelling to southeastern Asia, Stanford students devised a water pump that sells for thirty-seven dollars. Twenty thousand pumps have been sold in Burma, helping to alleviate water shortages in farming and produce more food for the impoverished people living in that country.

I mention this article not because I see financial parallels between Stanford and Ursuline, but because I see an interesting nexus of service and learning at Stanford that we have already begun to explore here on State Street through our recently revised Service Learning Program. Nonsectarian Stanford recognizes the importance of service in learning. And as befitting a Catholic institution, Ursuline Academy has always championed the connection between service and education in its programs. But it seems to me our next steps in moving our Service Learning Program forward will concern tying our separate academic disciplines into our service program.

And the importance Stanford places on interdisciplinary projects also seems to be a direction we need to explore here on State Street. Several weeks ago in this space I wrote about the possibility of a capstone project for seniors that might incorporate service as a feature. While we will have to approach such a project from a different scale than the one Stanford uses, the fact remains for service learning to be a truly transformative experience for our girls, we must provide them with more than a week of service done each summer, or simply collecting a random number of service hours over the course of the year. Stanford’s example ought to provide us with interesting insights on just what a more effective service program might look like. We will keep you abreast of further developments here at Ursuline as we look to devise the finest high school service learning program in America.

Message from the Elementary School Principal – Kim Harper

I’d like to thank Rhonda Musso and Mardi Black for chairing the Mother/Daughter Brunch on April 22. It was a beautifully organized event and a lovely day. Everyone in attendance looked like they enjoyed the morning. I’d also like to thank Andrew and Maritza Hyde of Pepperoni’s. The food and service were excellent, and the balloon arches were a very nice addition.

From April 22 through April 24, Ms. Kane; Mr. Gabriel; Mrs. Mortillaro, High School Dean of Students; Mr. Marc Ehrhardt, Ursuline Board Member; and I traveled to St. Louis for the Ursuline Administrators’ Conference. Each year the conference rotates to one of the central province school sites. Last year, due to an ice storm in St. Louis, the conference was cancelled. The year before last, it was held on our campus and, next year, it will rotate to Ursuline Dallas. These Ursuline administrator conferences allow the community of Ursuline Sisters and the Ursuline administrators from sister schools to meet with one another and discuss, collaborate, pray and deepen our spirituality as a wider Ursuline family. Ursuline St. Louis did a wonderful job of hosting us. Their hospitality was second to none and the conference presenter, Ann Garrido from the Aquinas Institute, was superb. She spoke on the book she is completing about spirituality of administration. She led us through a series of reflections and opportunities to share our various observations and experiences. During the day, we were called to reflect on our own spirituality as an administrator and what that means to us and those we administer.  We contemplated the many ways administration calls us to be closer to God.  We explored various themes of her book, which included invitations to deepen our spirituality and awareness of God’s grace. We discussed the call to trust, courage, forgiveness, hope, humility and more. Suffice it to say we all received a great deal from the presentation and even more from the sharing and community-building that took place among our fellow Ursuline colleagues. It is always beneficial to get away and learn, grow and be silent and contemplative in order to maintain perspective. In addition to attending the conference, Gretchen, John, Karen and I traveled about an hour out of St. Louis to visit the Ursuline Sisters who are now living in Alton in the retirement home. It was such a happy visit seeing the Sisters who were such big parts of Ursuline New Orleans for so long. Some of the Sisters you may remember are Sr. Teresita, Sr. Damien, Sr. Joan Marie, Sr. Marie, Sr. Angela and Sr. Miriam Theresa. They were overjoyed to see us and we gathered together for nearly two hours to reminisce and catch up on all that is going on at the Academy. They all send their love and prayers.

The May Crowning will be held tomorrow, Tuesday, May 1  in the Shrine at 8:15 a.m.  Parents are invited to join us.

The Middle School Athletic Awards will be held this Thursday, May 3 at 6 p.m. in the gym. All athletes will be recognized. Also, there will be a high school volleyball meeting following the awards for all students entering high school who are interested in playing volleyball.

The two uniform companies the elementary school uses, Schiros and Cloz, will have uniform fittings here on campus on Friday, May 4 from 3 p.m. until 6 p.m. and again on Saturday, May 5 from 8 a.m. until 4 p.m. in the auditorium. This is a great opportunity to get a jump on uniforms for next year.

Don’t forget to mark your calendars for the annual Ursuline Zephyrs  Night on Friday, May 11. The tailgate party begins at 5:30 p.m. and game will start at 7 p.m. Tickets are $10. Tickets will not be sold at the gate. You must pay for your tickets by May 9.

Please remember to keep your cafeteria accounts up to date by paying off any negative balances. From now until the end of school, the cafeteria will only be accepting cash as payment on accounts. Thank you for your cooperation.

Wednesday, May 9 will be the lower school swim party for students who sold three books of raffle tickets. Thursday, May 10 will be the middle school swim party for students who sold three books of raffle tickets.

President Gretchen Kane’s Farewell Gathering will take place on Tuesday, May 15 from 6 to 8 p.m. in the courtyard. Students, parents, alumnae, faculty and friends of Ursuline are invited to come by and wish Ms. Kane all the best.