Initiatives
Dear Parents,
Greetings and God’s grace be with you and with your families. This year has started out very well for Bishop Carroll. I continue to be edified by the students and inspired by their energy and enthusiasm. I can say with all sincerity, we have an amazing student body and a wonderful environment here at school. It makes me proud to be both a graduate and a chaplain of such a great institution!
The purpose for this letter is to inform you of new and renewed efforts that the faculty and administration are making to fulfill our mission: to assist parents in forming Disciples of Christ who enrich the culture as stewards of God’s gifts. ( In preparation for this school year) As this school year developed several themes have come to the forefront. Among them are ‘Pride in Yourself, Pride in Your School,’ and ‘Excellence Through Humility’ as well as a focus on communication between administration, faculty, staff and parents. These ideas have led to new initiatives that will allow us to more fully accomplish our school’s mission.
In an effort to assist you and enhance our relationship, Associate Principle Tom Gorman and myself are offering a new parent forum once a quarter. This parent forum is a further development of the “Parenting Generation Wh[Y]” sessions that I offered last year. They are intended to be educational and relational. I will be offering a short presentation on Characteristics of Catholic Education for Generation Wh[Y] and Mr. Gorman will be communicating with you concerning aspects of the educational environment of BCCHS.
This forum is intended to include time to celebrate the many talents of our students from visual arts, to music, to performing arts and more. We will also partake of hors devours as we mingle with one another to discuss relevant issues that affect our students and our school. We will spend some time in prayer for our school community and one another, and we will end the evening with a dialogue centered on pertinent issues identified by parents that will serve to guide us in meeting the academic and spiritual needs of our students.
This first forum will be held Wednesday, September 20th at 6:00pm in the BCCHS Library. Please consider attending, as this is a prime opportunity to be involved in “Educating Generation Wh[Y]”.
The key to a truly Catholic education is conversion of mind and heart. Discipleship happens when a person encounters Christ and conforms their identity to his. As a Catholic school this identity is expected both internally by our students and parents, and externally by society at large. The administration and faculty will continue to foster this Catholic identity.
We will continue to expect our young men and women to dress modestly to protect their dignity and to represent the Catholic character of our school. We will continue to curtail inappropriate dancing such as dirty-dancing or mosh pitting. Those few students who choose to do such dancing will be asked to make a different choice or could be asked to leave the dance. Finally, some students who come to various events choose to drink alcohol illegally thus are endangering both their lives and the lives of others. This behavior is totally unacceptable. In an effort to curtail this activity we have utilized a breathalyzer test to determine if in fact students have been drinking. This year we are redoubling our efforts by administering random breathalyzer tests as students enter school sponsored dances. In this way we hope to encourage students to make prudent and moral choices when spending time with one another and to ensure that we are providing a safe environment for our students.
Who enrich culture as stewards of God’s gifts
As I began this letter saying, we have an amazing student body here at BCCHS, which is to say, your children are amazing people! God has given our students many gifts and talents. Time and time again our students prove that they excel in every area of achievement. Whether their gift is musical, scientific, mathematical, linguistic, artistic or athletic, the BCCHS student body can boast of great achievement and success. Furthermore we hope to balance this boast with a true sense of humility that admits that we will always have more to accomplish and can excel in many more ways. Our success comes from the fact that our desire for excellence is based on a culture of striving for excellence. In an effort to foster this culture of striving we have established a new BCCHS Leadership Retreat. This is a one day retreat in which every student who is a leader in any school sponsored activity will be encouraged to take ownership of their role. The intention is to give them skills to guide and direct the activities of which they are leaders. In this way we hope that our student leaders will be able to inspire the entire student body to be joyful stewards of the gifts God has given them. We also hope that this will give our student leaders more direct ownership of our culture of striving for excellence. The more our leaders have “pride in themselves and pride in their school” so too, the more will the student body at large have this same pride.
Bishop Carroll sincerely desires to assist you in educating and forming your children. Please continue to pray for us so that God may give success to the work of our hands.
Sincerely in Christ,
Rev. C. Jarrod Lies
Chaplain, BCCHS
For your convenience we will have a VIRTUS certification class in the BCCHS library on Tuesday, September 19th from 3:45-6:45. Please feel free to join us.
