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Blue Ribbon School

St. Monica School has been named a Blue Ribbon School!

The Blue Ribbon School Award is the highest honor a school can receive from the U.S. Department of Education. We are proud to receive this very special honor, and grateful to our talented and committed staff, terrific parents, and hard-working students for making this award possible.

U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings named 250 schools as the first ones to be selected in the 2006 No Child Left Behind - Blue Ribbon Schools Program. These public and private K-12 schools are being honored for helping close the achievement gap and for their students who achieve at very high levels. St. Monica is among those schools whose students, regardless of background, achieve in the top 10 percent of their state on state tests, and show continuous student improvement.

We thank God for this honor. Here at St. Monica, we also have many people to thank for this award. God has blessed us with incredibly strong support at the parish level. Our school would not be nearly fifty years old and going strong without the support of parishioners and our pastor, Monsignor Paul Koetter. We are blessed, too, with extremely hard working and committed School Commission members who take their job seriously and care very much about our school. They spend countless hours behind the scenes in committee work, and we’re very grateful for their efforts on behalf of our school. In addition, our PTO is awesome! They offer support that is unrivaled, allowing St. Monica to enjoy countless “extras” that benefit our students, and they offer their time and assistance as well as financial support. St. Monica families are just great! They never fail to pitch in, get involved, and have fun with us. We truly believe that our Blue Ribbon students are awesome kids, but we’re not the only ones. When SMS students are in other venues (on field trips and at competitions, for example), we hear so many compliments about them, and we believe they’re most deserving of their kudos.

St. Monica students make our ministry a joy. We’re very proud of them. What else goes into the making of a good school? It takes the entire staff to make St. Monica the warm, caring place that it is, with a focus on Christian values and academic excellence. It takes everyone-- from our wonderful cafeteria staff, dedicated Extended Day Program staff, the amazing maintenance team whose job seems never-ending, our hard-working school counselor and caring, supportive teachers’ assistants, our welcoming office team and always-at-the-ready school nurses, and last but certainly not least, our talented, caring and committed teachers who sacrifice financially to be here, but love what they do. We thank God for the Blue Ribbon team that has earned us a Blue Ribbon School award.

October 3-6 was named Blue Ribbon Week at St. Monica, and included an assembly with speaker Jeannine Vesper (former SMS teacher and principal who spent 25 years on staff) and several other special events for students and staff. It’s been a pleasure to celebrate!