Happy Catholic Schools Week!
Happy Catholic Schools Week (1/31 – 2/6) from our faculty and students! We want to thank our students and families for a wonderful conclusion to Catholic Schools’ Week. We had three spirit-dress days (house colours, fancy dress day, and ugly sweater day), which all went incredibly well; students elevated the days to be special ones, all the while holding to the performance they regularly give. In all, it was a resounding success we will look forward to making this a tradition for years to come!
Spreading School Spirit!
In celebration of Catholic Schools Week, we created our school’s first Spirit Wear: St. John Paul II High School Bracelets and Car/Laptop Stickers! It is a small start, but our students and families seem excited to rep them anyway!
If you’d like a JPIIHS Bracelet or Sticker, they are available for order on our website under the “SPIRIT” section: www.chestertonjpii.org/spirit
They are fun way to remember the school and help spread the word we are here to the community!
Student Applications Now Open!
A reminder that we have opened up our new student applications for the 2021-2022 academic year! If you know of any students or families that might be interested, please direct them to our website www.chestertonjpii.org/admissions to apply.
The early application deadline is April 23rd, and the late application deadline is May 28th. All applications after that date will be moved to our waitlist for first-come, first-serve opportunities.
If you have any questions, or would like to shadow a day, please contact our headmaster, Mr. Hockel, at BHockel@chestertonjpii.org
St. Joe’s Gratitude Gala: February 13th!
A shout-out that St. Joe’s is hosting their spring gala on the evening of February 13th. If you ae interested in supporting our parochial schools, please reach out to them!
The following is an excerpt from their flier, attached below:
“Complimentary registration available at https://spirit2021.ggo.bid ,then click ‘Get Started’. Join us to celebrate all that we are grateful for and bid on some amazing auction items and experiences.
Questions? Please contact Bri Oronoz at 970.484.1171 x241.
Thank you for supporting Saint Joseph Catholic School”
Interested in Becoming a JPIIHS Volunteer?
We had great success with our End of Year Campaign, but we’re still trying to raise money through the spring to support our students and keep our school affordable as we prepare for next year!
If you or another community member would be interested in helping a committee with the effort, please email Executive Director Liz Yeh at LYeh@chestertonjpii.org. Thank you!
From the Headmaster’s Desk
Our dearest friends and families,
As spring is nearing in northern Colorado, and with the general mildness of the winter it really is starting to feel like spring, flowers have been much coming to my mind. In the classroom the students are finishing with the Greeks and moving onto the Romans, they are running through The Republic and nearing the Nicomachean Ethics; they have perfected one-point perspective and are penetrating two-point; they are mapping the order of reality as they pair geometry with constellations. Perhaps these things do not remind you of flowers, but they do me, and I can tell you why by expanding on the utter scandal of the University of Leicester cutting Chaucer and Beowulf from their curriculum.
Why are these beautiful texts– rich, and long vining their way through the culture of Western Civilization being pruned from our ancestral halls that they helped to form? Because they are being replaced with “A chronological literary history, a selection of modules on race, ethnicity, sexuality and diversity, a decolonized curriculum, and new employability modules.” Aside from a few snide remarks (you don’t have chronology in history if you remove portions of the history itself; a postcolonialist attitude has imposed colonialist views on authors who were in no way were colonists; etc, etc.) I will refrain from beleaguering how wrong I find this particular example to be, but I will take a moment to explain why this is a moronic move toward mundanity: it is a general rule of gardening that you prune shoots and the diseased, but that you should never prune the collar (that base where all the growing stems from), and these texts so foundational to our civilization should certainly be understood as such.
Reality has this funny way of showing us beauty and wonder, and we have a funnier habit of not only ignoring it, but uprooting it. And so this is why I more seriously consider the flowers– they are good, and by their very existence they increase our understanding of goodness. Take a poppy, for example: the good poppy is one that grows vibrantly to attract the bees, and one that is well rooted in the tradition of its particular petaled position; poppies flourish and thrive because they have grown and adapted to the world, but they follow the common trend of their predecessors without losing those inherent qualities that make them so identifiable and wonderful. Isn’t it such a strange thing, then, to realise that the poppy is perfect because by merely being as it is, it fulfils its telos?
I am sure I have not worded this connection as I should like, so let me try once more: the reason to teach these books should be self-evident, because they help humans to be more human. Of course, we could claim that a more progressive approach is needed for the modern university classroom, because, of course, “Time and tide wait for no man”, and thus we must untether ourselves from the old ways so we can more rapidly charge towards that bright future. Why devote time to pursuits that take so much time to master but are so deeply impractical to modern life? This is why we proclaim: “The life so short, the crafts so long to learn”, and desire to only spend our time following those most necessary of crafts that will help us to better understand the world as it is today!
This is what the flower knows by its very construction that the dearly misled at the University of Leicester would understand if they opened the books before pitching them: for us to cultivate a beautiful world worth growing in we must trace our roots well, for this is what lends us to true flourishing.