Year in Review – Christ the Redeemer Catholic Schools
By Scott Morrison Superintendent, Christ the Redeemer Catholic Schools
What were the highlights you accomplished this year?
Our greatest success in response to the pandemic was the use of live streaming to deliver education when staff or students needed to self-isolate. Live streaming ensured learning was only minimally disrupted so far this year.
In short, teachers kept teaching and students kept learning, regardless of where they were physically located. When the Grade 7-12 students began learning at home in November, they continued following their regular schedules and, due to live streaming, are still exposed to many of the same methods as they were in the regular classroom. To support live streaming, the division has loaned out over 1,000 Chromebooks and developed protocols for best practice. We feel we’re completely equipped to pivot between learning in school and learning at home as required for the rest of this year.
What are your plans and hopes for 2021?
When we are no longer dominated by the pandemic, we’ll continue to focus on faith, wellness and academic excellence. In the area of faith, we will ensure we permeate faith into every element of the school experience; it’s more than just one religion class a day. In the area of wellness, we’ll continue to respond to the rise we see in anxiety, isolation and depression among our students.
To that end, although we are the division that live streams, we are also very worried about the impact of screen time on our students’ wellness. As a result, we will resume our #Relationships in a Digital Age lessons that are designed to improve communication, enhance connection and inspire activities that don’t rely on screens. We are proud that students will have repeated lessons on this topic with units in Grades 4 through to 11 each year. We want to have healthy, well-balanced, and internet-savvy students, and #Relationships in a Digital Age is an intentional program to achieve this.
In the area of academic excellence, we plan to ensure we continue our literacy focus. In short, our students are reading and writing more than ever, and we will continue to inspire this.
We will also continue to in-service our new teachers in the use of a new mathematics resource that will further improve student learning in that area. We will also give our teachers the time they need to understand the new curriculum and determine which resources they need to teach the curriculum.
Schools in Christ The Redeemer Catholic are among the highest performing in the province and we will continue to aspire to that level of excellence.
An area of special pride for us in Strathmore are our elementary and secondary music programs. Teachers in the music and band programs at Sacred Heart Academy and Holy Cross Collegiate not only deliver excellence in Strathmore, but also help inspire it around the division.