It was a morning filled with pizza and praise as St. Joseph Catholic School celebrated National Catholic Schools Week by attending a school-wide Mass followed by a pizza lunch on Thursday. This was just one of many celebrations held throughout the elementary and secondary campuses this week.
Beginning last Sunday, each day of the week represented a different celebration, including a celebration of the parish, the community and Catholic vocations (marriage, single life, priesthood and religious life). In Thursday’s celebration of students, younger students were paired with older students in an effort to bring the campuses together and form connections.
Stephanie Rayburn, assistant principal of St. Joseph’s secondary campus, attended St. Joseph Catholic School and returned as a teacher before becoming an administrator, so celebrating Catholic education comes easy for her.
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“All faiths are welcomed into our school, but we teach the Catechist in our religion classes, so celebrating Catholic Schools Week is the heart of our identity,” Rayburn said.
For Rayburn, this week means shining a light on what makes St. Joseph Catholic School special.
“It is who we are, and it’s absolutely what makes us unique,” Rayburn said. “And it’s, to me, celebrating how we’re different than others, and I don’t mean different as in better, I just mean that it is part of who we are, and we want to make sure that that’s engrained in how we celebrate and what we do on a daily basis.”
One example Rayburn gave to showcase the school’s uniqueness is its ability to use faith as a solution to problems many schools face.
“It comes as a surprise to many people that our student body is just like any school’s student body,” she said. “We have the diversity that all schools have and the challenges that all schools have; we just get to address those challenges with a component of faith as a solution.”
New to the school this year is the student ambassador program in which eighth through 12th graders can apply to become representatives of St. Joseph Catholic School on various occasions.
“We always want students to be the front face of our campus in everything that we do, but you don’t want them to be a random selection, so we have ambassadors, and those students would represent us for a tour or if we needed a student representative to go and speak on behalf of the school,” Rayburn said.
Sophomore Paul Johnson and junior Jackson Carey are two of those student ambassadors.
“Leadership, effort and overall kind of character and confidence,” are a few characteristics Carey said are necessary to become a student ambassador. “You want to be able to role model all the rest of the student body and show them what St. Joseph’s all about.”
For Johnson, being an ambassador and celebrating Catholic Schools Week means demonstrating the term “Catholic schools” and recognizing the importance of living life and raising children with God in mind. Being paired with their Prayer Pals is the perfect example of how he and his peers use their faith to form connections with each other.
“The spirit behind our Prayer Pals was to unite our secondary and our elementary campus,” Rayburn said. “And in doing so, on a monthly basis, they send messages, prayers and drawings back and forth to each other.”
St. Joseph Catholic School will wrap up the weeklong event with a celebration of faculty, staff and volunteers on Friday and a celebration of family on Saturday.
To learn more about St. Joseph Catholic School, visit stjosephschoolbcs.org/.
