St. Ann: Our Mission and Vision

St. Ann Catholic School Mission and Vision Statement

Mission: Our mission is to provide a Catholic education through faith, service, and love.

Vision: We envision a thriving school for all children that will provide a premier education in the Catholic tradition.

This message goes out to everyone who is part of the St. Ann community, especially since our accreditation process takes place in less than two months. I want to share these statements so our greater community is informed. I want you to be aware of the mission and vision statement the St. Ann staff created during the first days of in-service last August. The staff came together to examine and update the school's mission and vision statement, which should be reviewed every year. The last time it was updated was in 2013 when the school was going through the last accreditation process.

7th Graders Taking Geography Test

Our goal in developing new statements was to write an honest statement that could be understood, lived out, and memorized by everyone at St. Ann, especially the students. The previous mission statement was inclusive but too long to be memorized, especially by students. The mission statement answers the question of why we exist. Well, we exist to provide a Catholic education through faith, service, and love. The vision statement is future-casting in guiding us to where we hope to be five years from now. As we look to the future, our goal is to improve the quality of education we offer our students to the point we are offering a premier education to all our students at every level. At present, we provide our students a very good education. We aren't premier yet, but I do believe with a lot of hard work, we will get there sooner than later. What I ask from every teacher, staff member, student, family, parishioner, alumni, and supporter is to help get to where we need to be. Let's become a premier Catholic school for all our students together.

Chess Extracurricular Exploration

At this point, the accreditation process is taking most of my time. With so much yet to be done, the accreditation process hangs over all of us. As the head of school, this is the fifth time I've led a school through the accreditation process. This is nothing new to me. Every five years, the accrediting agency changes the accreditation process to keep up with the changing times. The idea of the process is that work is done on a yearly basis to achieve a five-year goal. There are steps that need to be put into place to be able to reach goals.

Scholastic Book Fair

One of the goals from 2013 was to improve math scores on the ITBS by five normal curve equivalent (NCE) points. This is a great goal to achieve. I wasn't at St. Ann five years ago, so I commend those who set that goal. A five NCE point improvement makes sense; one NCE point for every year of a five-year process. The first year, 2014, huge improvements were achieved, only to drop back near the original scores. The five NCE points were not achieved by any grade after five years. These scores are from the ITBS, which is administered late April or early May. The other two goals dealt with increasing the amount of technology used in classrooms and in classroom instruction.

Scholastic Book Fair

The goals we are setting for this new accreditation process will not be five-year goals but one-year goals. After accomplishing these three goals, we will set three more goals for the following year. If we achieve three goals on a consistent basis, our test scores will improve; everything will improve. In the words of Fr. Ernie, "Improve the quality of the school." That's what we are doing. Sustainable improvement cannot happen over night and cannot be done in a vacuum. Improvement is going to take time, and is going to take us working together.

Library Volunteers

St. Ann Improvement Goals:

1. St. Ann needs to add a school counselor to the staff. The hope is that the school counselor will also be qualified to work as the school’s assistant principal.

2.  St. Ann would like to become a one-to-one school with iPads for grades 2-4. We are already one-to-one in grades 5-8.

3.  St. Ann would like to develop more individualized lessons geared toward the individual students to better serve them.  This is where a counselor and assistant principal would help, especially in breaking down the data and helping teachers create more individualized lesson plans.

Kindergarten Free Play

All the Catholic Schools of this diocese minus the Jubilee Schools are going through the AdvancED accreditation process together. The visiting AdvancED team will be here April 1st & 2nd to meet with all the school leaders. One of their meetings is with parents from all the schools. Lori Locke and Jimmy Crews will be the parents representing St. Ann.

Members of AdvancED School Improvement Plan committee are: Didier Aur (principal), Angela de Jong (development director), Annmarie Ghio (teacher), Teresa Ferrante (teacher), Mike Green (technology coordinator), Susan Hunt (parish administrator), Lori Locke (Home & School president), Liz Wehmeyer (parent and Apple certified teacher), and Fr. William Parham (associate pastor).

Thank you to everyone who completed a teacher, staff, parent, or student survey last fall. These surveys have come in handy in developing goals for the school. We hope to use annual surveys to keep the improvement process going.

Support St. Ann

If you have a little time, please say some prayers for a successful accreditation process. We need and appreciate those prayers.

God bless you,
Didier Aur, Principal
St. Ann Catholic School