Catholic Schools Week celebrates Catholic identity
Joe Kohn of The Michigan Catholic
Published January 26, 2007
Catholic Schools Supplement
 Joe Kohn | The Michigan Catholic St. Stanislaus Kostka student Vinnie Jelsomero receives Communion from Fr. Godswill Uchenna Agbagwa at a Mass before school. Students at the Wyandotte school attend Mass each day before classes. | Detroit — Schools across the Archdiocese of Detroit are celebrating their Catholic heritage during Catholic Schools Week, which is celebrated across the country from Jan. 29 to Feb. 3.
As a national marketing campaign supported by U.S. Bishops and the National Catholic Educational Association, Catholic Schools Week gives Church-run schools the opportunity to highlight what makes them unique.
Schools typically celebrate in their own ways. Many use activities, Christian service projects, academic competitions and student, parent and teacher appreciation days to mark the week. Others have field trips or special guests in school.
Whatever a school plans, though, Catholic Schools Week is an important initiative, says Julie DeGrez, principal of St. Germaine School in St. Clair Shores, because it speaks to the broad concept of Catholic education.
 Robert Delaney | The Michigan Catholic
All Saints Principal Jacci Brown with eighth-grader Madeline Tatro and seventh-grader Patrick Sieloff. | "It's a week that we celebrate our faith and the fact that we can come to school and celebrate being Catholic at the same time," says DeGrez, whose school is, among other activities, inviting a speaker to teach about Ven. Solonus Casey, OFM Cap., who lived in Detroit, and St. Francis of Assisi. "We teach the faith, live the faith, practice the faith. We do all of this together."
It's not hard to see why Catholic education is important in today's culture, she adds.
"Our students in our Catholic schools understand fully the need for people in our world to be Christian and to be caring and accepting," DeGrez says. "Our young people are seeing more and more of how that's not (happening) in other parts of the world, and that's education. We educate them socially as well as academically. The earlier you start with our students, the better off they'll be and hopefully the better world we'll have in the future."
Indeed, Christ's presence — both in actions and liturgies — is central to the mission of Catholic schools, and thus also on display during Catholic Schools Week.
St. Damian School in Westland, for example, has a week full of activities, from movie days for the students to a presentation of an owl. But the spiritual highlight of the week, principal Susan Perna explains, is the time students spend with the Lord on Tuesday, Jan. 30, when the school has Eucharistic adoration.
 Joe Kohn | The Michigan Catholic
Mercy High School senior Luree Brown looks up at a
sculpture of Christ and the Blessed Mother in the schools new hermitage room. Mercy's religion staff made the room to give students a quiet place to pray and reflect, away from the hustle and bustle of school life. | "It gives us a special time to just focus on what Catholic schools are about," says Perna. "In our busy life of education, we have our goals and our behavioral objectives and instructional objectives. I think we still need kind of a hallmark time to see why we're different from other schools.
"We're Catholic, and we should be proud of that."
Each year, a theme is chosen at a national level for the Catholic Schools Week campaign. This year, the theme is "The Good News in Education." And while Catholic schools in and around Detroit create environments of camaraderie for the faithful and whomever wishes to receive Catholic education, it's second-nature to see and celebrate that Christ's presence in the classroom is, indeed, good news.
"We want to promote Catholic family life, and that's really important for the whole school," says Karen Johnson, principal of St. Stanislaus Kostka. "It's not a Catholic school. It's a Catholic family."
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