8/21/20 - Friday Forget-Me-Nots by Jim Silcott

Dear Our Lady of Peace Family:



My first newsletter of the new school year? What should I write about? Covid? That’s been covered ad naseum in the news, on the internet on SchoolSpeak. Very important but I need a break. Politics? Also important but school principals, like good bartenders, never reveal their take on the people running our world.

Climate change. Protests. Looting. Killer Hornets. Hurricanes. OSU football cancellation. Sports in a bubble. Have you got your keys? Have you got your wallet? Have you got your mask? What have I forgotten? Oh, let me throw in my own personal saga of having my shoulder and three ribs broken by a hit and run blue van while on a bicycle trip. The fun never stops!

As I prepare for a week of faculty and staff meetings next week to re-open Our Lady of Peace School I have said to anyone who will listen that I would be highly suspect of any school principal who claims he or she isn’t nervous about the upcoming year. We simply don’t know how all of this is going to go. Like the big football game (that apparently high school students are getting ready for but Ohio State is not) you prepare the best you can, but when the opening whistle blows you just try your hardest to run the ball and score the touchdown. During the game you adjust your offense, you tweak your defense. Your quarterback goes down? Second string better be ready. The skies open up? You keep on playing. Whatever it takes.

There are two words that keep entering my mind as I think about the 2020-2021 school year. Patience and Joy. Each day that we are in school, every time that I have to make a decision or interact with a parent, a student, a faculty or staff member I have pledged to keep those two words imbedded in my brain and lodged firmly on the tip of my tongue. Currrently, the world does not seem to be a place of joy and Lord knows that patience is running thin for most of us and yet they seem to me a key to success this year.

About patience I like this passage from Proverbs which admonishes me that  “A hot-tempered person stirs up conflict, but the one who is patient calms a quarrel”. We, (me) have to focus in on what we can do rather than what we can’t. We (me) have to meet people where they are at rather than where we would like them to be.

About joy John says,“ I have much to write to you, but I do not want to use paper and ink. Instead, I hope to visit you and talk with you face to face, so that our joy may be complete” (even if I am wearing a mask while doing so!).

I am so excited to have students in the building again, to talk with them and laugh with them and watch them learn and grow. It’s been a long time since March!

And of course, our Master Teacher sums up both words nicely when He simply and powerfully tells us “to love on another.” 

At Our Lady of Peace we are going to do everything we can to advance learning, live and in person all year if we can, virtual if we must, but always with an eye towards being joyful and patient with each other, particularly with our students. I invite you to join us in that effort and to continue to join us in praying for one another!

Jim Silcott