Crusader Chronicle

In my childhood years, my favorite actor was Sidney Poitier. For those of you for whom Sidney Poitier is not a familiar name, his most famous early movies included The Blackboard Jungle, To Sir With Love, In the Heat of the Night, and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. The first Sidney Poitier movie that I remember watching was Lilies of the Field, for which he won an Oscar for Best Actor.

In Lilies of the Field, Sidney Poitier portrayed a traveling handyman, driving in his station wagon from place to place and looking for work. In the movie, he meets a group of nuns, who ask him to build a chapel for them, so he agrees to work for them. During the entire movie, Sidney Poitier's character, Homer Smith, has a passion for completing the chapel by himself, so that, when he finishes, he can look with pride on what he has accomplished and what he has built. The longer he is there and the longer he works, the more people hear about what he is doing and offer their help. He politely declines their offers of help, even though the Catholics there have no chapel or church and instead gather each Sunday in a field for Mass.

Eventually, the local Catholics arrive at the site of the chapel, and simply start helping Homer, without asking his permission. Homer is forced to allow them to help build the chapel. He begins to realize that this chapel belongs to the community, the Church with a capital "C", and he learns the importance of doing the work of the Church in relation to others.

The Gospel reading on Sunday had a similar message. Jesus send the Apostles to preach, and he sends them two by two. We are called to evangelize, to preach the Gospel, as well, and we are called to evangelize in relation to others. Let us continue to seek opportunities to evangelize with others, whether in our families, in our parishes, in our neighborhoods, in our workplaces, or anywhere that God has placed us.

We would like to thank Jack Longino, St. Ignatius of Antioch Class of 2023, for choosing St. Ignatius as the beneficiary of Jack's Eagle Scout Project. Jack has been working this summer to renovate the St. Ignatius Gym, a project that benefits not only the school but our CYO Program and our entire parish. Please consider donating to this worthwhile project; see the photo above for more information on how you can support Jack.

Thank you to our teachers and Mrs. Crozier for organizing and collating summer packets for each of our students on each grade level. These summer packets were sent home at the end of the school year with our students. Students should be actively working on their summer packets to continue learning this summer. We are almost halfway through the summer, so, keep up the good work!

Parents who are interested in additional summer academic resources can stop by the school office during summer office hours for a collection of book and workbook resources. Although summer packets are required, these additional resources are not required. If you are unable to come to the office during summer hours, please contact Mr. Meade, Mrs. Chapuis, or Mrs. Perini, and we will leave the backpack of additional summer academic resources on the bench inside the main entrance to the school for you to retrieve at your convenience.

August 20 - Playground Night for PreK

August 22 - Playground Night for Kindergarten

Wednesday, August 28 - Meet Your Teacher - 3:00 to 4:00 pm

Tuesday, September 3 - Full Day of School for Grades 1 through 8

Tuesday, September 3 - PreK-3, PreK-4, Kindergarten Boys ONLY - Full Day of School

Wednesday, September 4 - PreK-3, PreK-4, Kindergarten Girls ONLY - Full Day of School

Thursday, September 5 - All Students PreK-3 through Grade 8 - Full Day of School

Wednesday, September 11 - Back to School Night

Saturday, September 21 - Parish Picnic - 5:00 pm

It's not too late; spots are still available! Conwell-Egan High School is offering several camps this summer, for students entering Grades 1 through 9. Please click the link below for more information.

Summer Camp Link: https://conwell-egan.org/summer-camps

Please click the link below for the latest 2024-2025 St. Ignatius of Antioch Elementary School Calendar. Our initial calendar was shared with all of our families in May, and the calendar has been updated since then. The attached calendar will continue to be updated as the year progresses and is subject to change.

Thank you to the many families who have donated food, time, and money to support the Villella Family. Please continue to pray for Mrs. Ann Villella and Brandon Villella (St. Ignatius of Antioch Class of 2025), who tragically lost Mr. Michael Villella last month.

For those of you who would still like to make a donation in support of the family, please mail or deliver a check, payable to St. Ignatius of Antioch, to the school office, care of Mrs. Crozier. Thank you in advance for your support of the Villella Family.

Congratulations to the following winners of our June and July 500 Club drawings:

June 500 Club Winners:

$50: Bridget Hosler (Ticket #29)

$100: Carolyn McGovern (Ticket #262)

$250: Danielle Van Wert (Ticket #71)

$500: Susan Harris (Ticket #309)

July 500 Club Winners:

$50: Bobby Serpente (#09)

$100: John Kerper (#181)

$250: Kelly Capuano (#377)

$500: Ann Marie Flanagan (#317)

There are still 68 tickets left for purchase - one of those may be your lucky number! See below for information on how to buy a ticket and join the 500 Club.

Thank you again to all the faculty, parishioners, friends, relatives and school families who have purchased tickets. We have sold 432 tickets so far; only 68 tickets left for the 2024 drawings! We are halfway through the 500 Club Year, so there are six monthly drawings left!

Our next drawing will be in early August, so make sure you have your ticket!

There are still 20 chances to win during 2024!!

TICKETS CAN BE PURCHASED BY FOLLOWING THIS LINK:

https://tinyurl.com/SIS500club

l.com/SIS500club

The 2024 School Office Hours for summer are:

Mondays - Office Closed

Tuesdays - 9 am to 1 pm

Wednesdays - 9 am to 1 pm

Thursdays - 9 am to 1 pm

Fridays - Office Closed

Please call ahead and let us know if you are planning to stop in the office, in case Mrs. Perini or Mrs. Chapuis has to step out of the office.

Mr. Meade will be available in person Mondays through Thursdays from 9:30 am to 3 pm.

Mr. Meade will be available on Fridays by email at mrmeade@sischool.org

Have a great summer!

Please read the message below from Mrs. Casey:

Dear Parents,

Acceptance into the Honors Math program is determined by the Archdiocesan Math Committee, based on information we provide. To alleviate students being disappointed, we will provide information to those students accepted into the program at Meet Your Teacher Day in August.

Have a wonderful summer,

Mrs. Mary Casey

Mrs. Casey has asked that all families who still have books from the St. Ignatius of Antioch School Library return the books right away so that she can account for all the library books. Please contact Mrs. Casey by emailing mcasey@sischool.org if you have any questions.

Here are the latest updates for the 2024-2025 school year:

1. Mrs. Azara, Mrs. Murphy, and Mrs. McBeth will continue in Pre-School.

2. Ms. Dionne will continue in Kindergarten.

3. Mrs. Edwards will continue in First Grade.

4. Mrs. Ficarro will continue in Second Grade.

5. Mrs. Montemarano has been hired to teach Third Grade. Mrs. Montemarano is a former colleague of Mrs. Edwards and Mrs. Chapuis from Grey Nun Academy, and she has been teaching for 13 years at different Catholic elementary schools in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. We welcome Mrs. Montemarano to St. Ignatius!

6. We are actively looking for a new Third Grade teacher.

7. Ms. Schmidt will continue in Fourth Grade.

8. Mrs. McBride will take a part-time role as the Fifth Grade ELA Teacher.

9. Mr. Spadea will join Ms. Hensler, Mr. Weinert, and Ms. Esposito in Middle School.

10. Mrs. Casey will continue as the Math Honors Teacher.

11. Mr. Seibel, Mrs. Gray, Ms. Murray, and Mr. Escandon will continue in their respective teacher roles.

12. Miss Savanna Weight has been hired as the PE teacher for the 2024-2025 school year. Miss Weight has been teaching PE at Holy Family Regional Catholic School in Levittown since 2022, and she will continue teaching at Holy Family three days a week. Miss Weight will teach PE at St. Ignatius two days a week starting in the fall. We welcome Miss Weight to St. Ignatius!

13. Mrs. Hastings will continue as the Learning Support Teacher.

14. No decision has been made about the Assistant Principal position.

Please notify the office of any changes in family or parent email addresses, mailing addresses, or phone numbers.

Please see the following message from Nicole Kloc, RaiseRight Coordinator at St. Ignatius Elementary School:

Hello!

SUMMER ORDERS

I will be placing 2 orders over the summer for physical gift cards. I'll contact you once the orders are ready and pick up will be at my house, I'll send my address as needed. Order dates are as follows:

8/1 - Pick up second week in August

LOCAL BUSINESSES

The following local businesses are stocked regularly but may be difficult to find on the website/app. Please check the "Gifts & Flowers" category, or simply search them by name in the search tool! If there is a local business you'd like to see here, please reach out & I'll see what I can do to add them.

Cafe Antonio (10%)

Capt'n Chucky's Crab Cake Co. (8%)

Carlucci's (10%)

Continental Tavern (8%)

Delorenzo's Yardley (10%)

GIANT - St. Ignatius (5% rebate)

McCaffrey's (5%)

Shady Brook Farm (10%)

Wegman's - Available in $100 & $50 gift cards - (5%)

Thank you for using the RaiseRight program!

Please let me know if you have any questions and have a great end of the school year!

Nicole

Cell: 609-954-2248

In order to see all the latest photos of all our school events, remember to follow St. Ignatius of Antioch School on our Instagram account: @sischoolofyardley

You will find photos of all of our events from this school year so far, and you will see photos of all of our upcoming events. You do not want to miss the fun!

This is a new account, monitored by Mrs. Crozier, and we thank her for all her efforts!

We want to thank Home and School for all of their support during the past school year. From coordinating recess and cafeteria supervision to organizing school assemblies to providing special lunches and treats for our students to supporting our teachers with school supplies and food treats to raising money for our school, Home and School has been an amazing support!

Annmarie Flanagan is retiring from PREP at the end of June. After that she will continue with RCIA (now called OCIA). If you or someone you know (maybe your spouse) would be interested in becoming Catholic or just thinking about it, please tell him/her to call Annmarie on her cell --- 215-370-5701. The person does not have to be definite about it.

St. Ignatius of Antioch Parish has a parish-wide subscription to FORMED, a Catholic website with diverse Catholic movies, audio books, podcasts, shows, and more. You have free access to the content. Simply go to formed.org/signup, type in St. Ignatius of Antioch, look for the Yardley address on Reading Ave., click NEXT, type your name and preferred email address, and you will have access to the vast amount of content on FORMED.

This Year of Parish Revival is about falling deeper in love with the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus and following him more closely. Mirroring this internal journey with an external one is a beautiful way to connect body and soul in the pursuit of Christ.

The National Eucharistic Pilgrimage is not one event or a road trip—it is an exciting opportunity for American Catholics everywhere to physically embody our nation’s journey of Eucharistic Revival. Whether you are on the shores of Hawaii or in the mountains of Alaska, needing to stay close to home or deployed overseas, you are invited to be a part of this journey.

Visit: https://www.eucharisticpilgrimage.org/plan-your-own-pilgrimage

Congratulations to our 8th Graders on their June 5 Graduation! Thank you to our Grade 8 parents for all their support over many years . Thank you to Ms. Esposito (Mrs. Michel) for her leadership of the Class of 2024. We are so proud of our graduates for all their hard work!

Thank you also to Mrs. Crozier and Mrs. Perini for all their help with graduation. Thank you to Fr. Brownholtz for his support and for celebrating the Graduation Mass.

Congratulations to our Kindergarten Class for their graduation on June 4! Thank you to all the parents and grandparents who were able to attend, and thank you to Ms. Dionne for coordinating the Kindergarten Graduation Ceremony. Special thanks to Mrs. Crozier for all of her help.

Different questions were asked at the last General Assembly Meeting regarding teacher certification and teacher professional development.

The Archdiocese of Philadelphia and St. Ignatius of Antioch advertise for and seek certified teachers for all subject areas. In individual cases, teachers are hired due to need, certain qualifications, and experience, with the expectation that those teachers are already or will be pursuing certification.

Teachers who are already certified are required to pursue continuing education through Act 48, a State of Pennsylvania professional development law. Act 48 requires that teacher certification is kept active by the completion of 180 hours of Act 48 approved professional development every five years.

Act 48 Professional Development hours can be earned through college credits or other Act 48 approved professional development courses or programs. Teachers often attend or participate in professional development during the summer months, but professional development opportunities are offered in various settings throughout the calendar year.

The Office of Catholic Education of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia is a state-approved provider of Act 48 Professional Development. Each school year, the Archdiocese offers regional professional development sessions, in addition to professional development opportunities for specific disciplines. The Archdiocesan Induction program, outlined in an earlier Crusader Chronicle and included in the "Repeating School Information" at the end of this school newsletter, is also part of the Archdiocesan Act 48 Professional Development. St. Ignatius of Antioch Elementary School participates in both Archdiocesan Professional Development and the Archdiocesan Induction Program.

Teacher attendance at Professional Development sessions and programs can be funded by the parish (with prior approval), by colleges or universities, by Federal Title II funds, or by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.

At the General Assembly Meeting on Tuesday, March 19, Greg Lucidi, the St. Ignatius of Antioch Parish Business Manager, led a presentation and discussion of the budget for the coming 2024-2025 school year. The attached document was distributed as a hard copy at the General Assembly Meeting, so we wanted to share it with those parents who could not attend the meeting.

Three topics that were raised in the questions for the last General Assembly meeting, along with a response to each topic, are:

1. Religion Bee - we plan to participate in the Archdiocesan Religion Bee in the 2024-2025 school year.

2. Lunch Program - we have looked at several lunch programs since YAY! Lunch stopped service at St. Ignatius of Antioch. Some programs are not financially viable and some do not offer enough variety or enough healthy lunch choices or enough child-friendly choices. We are looking into the idea of starting with one or two local restaurants that would offer lunch service items for our students in the 2024-2025 school year, with the intention of expanding to more restaurants in the future. This is an ongoing topic of discussion with the Home and School Board.

3. First and Second Academic Honors - the possible return of a program of academic honors for our middle school students is also a topic of discussion at Home and School Board meetings. We are looking at the requirements of the Archdiocese for such a program, as well as the structure of similar programs at area Catholic elementary schools.

Questions were asked about the evaluation of teachers at both the January General Assembly and the March General Assembly.

New teachers in Archdiocesan Catholic schools are required to participate in the Teacher Induction Program. This is a state-mandated program that is coordinated by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, and it is composed of three meetings/trainings during the first year of teaching. Teachers who are in their second or third year of teaching may also be required to participate in the Induction Program if they did not complete Induction previously. Experienced teachers who are new to Catholic schools may participate in Induction voluntarily.

New teachers are assigned a mentor. Mentor teachers are chosen by their level of experience and are often chosen to mentor a new teacher who is teaching the same grade level or in the same range of grade level. Mentor teachers work with the new teacher for the first year and then continue mentorship as needed in the second year.

New teachers are formally observed at least twice a year. In addition, new teachers or teachers who are completing a teacher certification process may be observed by college or university personnel. Experienced teachers are formally observed at least once each school year. The Archdiocese asks principals to utilize the Danielson Framework as the preferred instrument for formal observations.

Informal observations and walk-through observations are done more frequently.

This is a repeat message; the original message below was sent through Option C on February 2, 2024.

At the Home and School General Assembly Meeting on Tuesday, January 30, 2024, some parents asked questions about the Archdiocesan Curriculum.

The link to the Archdiocese of Philadelphia Office of Catholic Education Elementary School Curriculum webpage is below:

https://www.aopcatholicschools.org/elementary/curriculum?post_category_id=37

You will find links on this page to the curriculum guidelines for Kindergarten through Grade 8, as well as the curriculum for Special or Enrichment Classes. Within each grade level, you will find curriculum guidelines for content areas.

Please take time to peruse these pages to learn about the curriculum in Catholic elementary schools in the Archdiocese.

A question that was raised at the January General Assembly Meeting was in regards to report cards and the availability for teachers to write comments. As some of you may have noticed, the report card format was changed from the 2022-2023 school year. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia controls the format of the report card, and a committee from the Archdiocese updated and finalized the 2023-2024 report card format in the summer of 2023. Currently, there is no part of the current report card format that allows for teacher comments.

One other change that you may have noticed is in the "Personal, Social Growth, Conduct", "Effort and Study Skills", and "Listening and Speaking" sections of the report card for Grades 1 through 8. The "+" mark and the "x" mark are clearly defined for the different specific areas under the three above headings, but a blank space with no mark is not defined. If a teacher leaves the space blank, without a "+" or "x', that indicates that the student is developing appropriately in that specific area - in other words, it is not an area that needs improvement, and it is not a strength either.

Another question that was asked at the General Assembly Meeting on January 30 was in regards specifically to the Journeys series, which is utilized at St. Ignatius in Kindergarten through Grade 4 classrooms. The questions that were asked were in regards to the replacement of that series due to the Journeys series being discontinued in the future.

The Journeys series will be discontinued in June of 2025. We plan to continue to use Journeys in the 2024-2025 school year. A small group of our St. Ignatius teachers are previewing other series in order to choose a replacement for the future.

The publisher of the Journeys series, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, has a new reading series, which is already in use in some schools and which has been approved by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. We are looking at that new Houghton Mifflin Harcourt series as one of the options.

In the October 1, 2023, Crusader Chronicle, we were proud to announce that St. Ignatius of Antioch was once again honored as an Archdiocese of Philadelphia School of Distinguished Instruction, based on the 2023 Terra Nova scores. St. Ignatius is included in the top 50 schools in the Archdiocese for this distinction. Congratulations to all of our parents, students, faculty, and staff for all their efforts. Keep up the good work!!

At the last General Assembly meeting, some parents asked about the choice of textbooks in Archdiocesan Elementary Schools. This is the Archdiocesan policy for textbook choices:

"As a service to the elementary schools of the Archdiocese, programs and textbooks are reviewed and evaluated each year by the respective curriculum committees, and recommendations are made to the Office of Catholic Education. Approval of programs and textbooks is made by the Office of Catholic Education through the Department of Curriculum, Instruction, Assessment and related Staff Development for PK-8.

The publication of Programs Approved for Use is published on the AOP Elementary Website. This resource aids administrators and faculties in the selection of the program and textbooks which best meet the needs of the individual school. Administrators are encouraged to involve the faculty in textbook selection. Program continuity is essential in the selection of textbooks and materials.

Administrators are responsible to consult the faculty to update programs and textbooks on a rotating basis. The recommended cycle for renewing curriculum resources is six years. Schools that wish to select programs or textbooks other than those reviewed and approved by the curriculum committees should seek further information and approval from the Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum, Instruction, Assessment and related Staff Development for PK-8. No pilot programs should be engaged in without the approval of the Office of Catholic Education.

School administrators should consult the guidelines when ordering programs, textbooks, and materials prior to completing state-funded instructional materials orders."

In addition to the above, administrators consult each other, and teachers also consult other teachers, for recommendations of textbook series. As we approach the 2024-2025 school year, we are looking specifically at a series to replace Journeys, which is being phased out. We have looked at the series that are currently recommended by the Archdiocese and are taking into account the advice of teachers and administrators at other schools.