JMJ
Dear Family,
Today is the feast day of Our Lady of the Rosary. The Rosary is not a set of rambling prayers. The Rosary has five decades and each decade is a meditation on an aspect of the life of Christ. Mary always directs us to her Son. We should never worship Mary. Worship is only due to God and God alone! However, we know that Mary can intercede for us. Look at Jesus’ first public miracle at the Wedding Feast at Cana. Read John Chapter 2 verses 1-11. Jesus was obedient to his mother. Jesus even challenged his mom about doing the miracle of changing the water into wine. Yet, He was obedient. We too can go to Mary, Jesus’ mother, and ask her to pray for us just like I could go to you and ask for you to pray for me or with me. Just as in our own domestic families, a child may ask his/her father for something and dad initially says “no”. Yet if the child goes to his/her mother and the mom asks the dad, at least in my house, I may be more considerate of granting my child’s request because my wife, their mother, asks me to do so. So let us take a moment and pray a Rosary as a family tonight and ask Mary to ask her Son to answer our prayers. Mary, Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us!
I have one COVID-19 update to report today. We had a parent receive a positive test today. The parent has not been in the school. The student of this parent is not showing any symptoms and has not been at the school since October 2nd. Therefore no other classmates need to be quarantined at this time. The student will still need to be quarantined for the next 14 days.
We are looking forward to welcoming back the rest of Mrs. Lightfoot’s class tomorrow from their time being quarantined. Mrs. Lightfoot had tremendous engagement and participation from her students at home. We appreciate all Mrs. Lightfoot’s hard work along with the parental support from home! Great job kids!
Some of you may know on Monday, October 5th, the Michigan Department of Health and Humans Services issued an Emergency Order for the whole state with the exception of Region 6, which is the Traverse City area. We have been in a bit of a limbo not knowing what we need to do and what protocols we need to follow. Included in this emergency order is a mask mandate for all students in school, ages five and up, and all adults in schools. This would include teachers, aides, office staff and volunteers. This order affects both public and non-public schools. I have attached the document to this e-mail to read if you are interested. Students in pre-school and readiness kindergarten program will not have to wear masks in their classrooms. They will still wear them in times of transition outside of their classrooms.
Another mandate is that our school will be required to publicly post any confirmed or probable cases on our school website within 24 hours of being notified. I will be using these updates for that posting. I will still e-mail them to our school family. However, they will also be available on our website as well.
Yesterday, I met with the superintendent and principals of the Catholic Schools in our diocese. Attached to this e-mail is a letter that I encourage you to read from our superintendent of Catholic Schools, Mark Salisbury. As mentioned above, this new order from the health department affects all of the schools in our diocese. We are not a pro-mask or anti-mask school. We are a pro student school. We make decisions based on the greatest ability for our students to attend our school and to pray and learn with their peers.
The new mask mandate will no doubt be a sacrifice for our students and staff. As our superintendent refers to in the letter, this decision will continue to be reviewed on a regular basis should this order change at the State level.
Students and staff will be required to wear masks while in the building, with the exception of while eating lunch. We will still allow students to play outside at recess without masks. Students and staff are still welcomed to wear their mask outside should they choose to do so. We will continue our cleaning protocols and frequent hand washing practices.
I apologize for the multiple e-mail updates you received yesterday. For some reason they were not sending right away and I was trying to figure out why. I was about 20 minutes into the process when all four of them sent simultaneously. Should you have any questions please feel free to reach out to me.
Tomorrow we will celebrate Mass again at 9:10 a.m. The Zoom information is listed below.
Holy Name Mass Zoom Link: us04web.zoom.us/j/71665578766?pwd=TjBma3ZYK3FibkF5V0EyTUJmOWl6QT09
Meeting ID: 716 6557 8766
Passcode: Godisgood!
Respectfully yours in Christ,
Joe
Emergency-Order-Department-of-Health-and-Human-Services-.pdf