Coming Soon: Exciting News from JPIIHS!
Keep an eye out for some very exciting announcements coming soon from JPIIHS!
Applications Are Still Open for SY 24-25!
It is not too late! Come join our unique and wonderful community at JPIIHS for the 2024-2025 school year. The application can be found at THIS LINK.
Questions? Want to schedule a shadow day? Reach out to Mrs. Ward at eward@jp2hs.com!
Student Activity Spotlight: CSU Math Day
Our students had the privilege of competing in the small schools division at the CSU Math Day in November. They had a great time building fellowship with other students and showing off their math skills!
A few of our students also created posters for their original poster competition. Three of our seniors (pictured) won 1st place in the competition, securing a $100 prize! Congratulations to our talented students!
Staff Article: Why I Wish I Could Have Had A Catholic Education
Taryn Bratnick, Theology Instructor
This is one of those things I could never tell my students, for fear it would come across with the same perceived condescension as “When I was a kid, we walked to school uphill both ways in 6 feet of snow,” but I really wish St. John Paul II would have existed when I was in high school.
My family has been in Northern Colorado since I was at the end of elementary school. Having jumped into a city where each public school was roughly the size of the entire town from which we had just moved, we elected to homeschool through middle school before I then attended Loveland High School for four years, enrolling in the International Baccalaureate program. Now when I say I wish JPII had existed, please don’t get me wrong. When I say I wish JPII had existed, I say it as a person who actually really enjoyed my own high school experience.
In the IB program, later AP classes, and throughout the school I had many teachers who were highly intelligent, attentive, good, and sacrificed enormously for the goodness of their students. Their care for me was tangible, and their desire to see me succeed to my highest potential a gift. Many of them I still count among the teachers I strive to live up to today. I was involved in a great many clubs and activities, thrived in the music programs, and enjoyed being part of the sports and spirit of the school.
Though they weren’t in most of my classes, I was also rather miraculously blessed with a group of very Catholic friends, whom I had mostly met through youth group at St. John the Evangelist in Loveland. These people, still my dear friends today, helped me strive for holiness, be the person I wanted to be in the face of the many temptations available to a high schooler, and eventually discern college with a desire to follow God’s will for my life. We ended up a priest, 4 missionaries (well, 1 of those is now a theology teacher), a school psychologist, and a Marine.
So when I say I wish JPIIHS had existed, I don’t mean I wish I could have escaped my own high school. In many ways, I had the best of what the high school years have to offer. Many of the experiences I had, I hope each of our high schoolers will get to have.
So why do I wish I had had the opportunity for a Catholic education as a high schooler?
Simply, because my heart longed for more.
I longed to be able to have the conversations with teachers and peers that I get to have with our students now. I longed to read about and to learn about and to discuss the most real, most relevant, and most important things to my life and heart, beyond what even my parents lovingly gave me. I longed to be able to put each subject I was learning (and I was a true nerd, so I really did like them all) into the context of their Creator with people who would be excited to do the same.
I wish I could have gone to JPIIHS because every day, I get to teach openly about the most life-giving News the world has ever received. I get to answer the same hard questions I had as a high schooler. I get to be there as these young people wrestle with the full Truth about themselves, the world, and the God who loves them. I get to see each of their teachers, no matter the subject, help them connect the dots of the amazingly rich and intelligible world we live in to that most sacred reality of the Incarnation of their God as man for their sakes. My friends and I did love our high school experience, but we longed for this ultimate Truth more.
I don’t envy modern high schoolers. The complexity of the world in which they are navigating their teenage years is far beyond what it was even 18 years ago when I started high school. I witness the effects of our world on them every day, and I wish I could give them the freedom, peace, and hope for which they were made, as I am sure you do as well.
But I am jealous of the chance they get here, because every school day, I get to be a part of giving to my students that which my own experience, no matter how wonderful it was, could not give, the only saving Truth for mankind, and that for which each human heart longs –Jesus Christ and His Church.
From the Headmaster’s Desk: The Last Hours of the Day of Yearning
In the last hours of the day yesterday I left the school and drove west towards home. I like going west, the feeling of going home, and it was redoubled because the sunset was filtered through a veil of clouds giving a soft light that made it a wonder to look upon. Most particularly, I was struck by how deeply Coloradan the scene was, because from my vantage the sun was setting directly into the crook between Long’s and Meeker. The two peaks, backlit by a gentle sun, looked like the arms of a mother cradling her bright child. And I, being a sentimental fool, stared. I watched until the last rays had sunk comfortably into the receptive arms of the mountains that had waited eagerly all day for this warm embrace.
There is something in that image that makes me think about the heart of Catholic education. Where for any other place—be it ivy league or inner city—the halls are not imbued with a special power that makes the people there better merely for having walked the walls. Surely, it comes only from the character of the men and women that inhabit the place; teachers with a fire for their material and a dissemination of true things, students that are eager and excited to grow and understand. Those are the marks of the truly excellent school.
But with a Catholic school, there is both a greater blessing and a more important duty. Because in Catholic education it is not merely the case that we are wondering the halls seeking knowledge as Diogenes sought one virtuous man, but we become something of a vessel for God’s work. The school teacher is not God, obviously. The school building is not a fabled hall of justice and righteousness. The building, just as any other, is a shelter and the teacher is one trying to help students weather whatever modern storm has blown about us. But in the Catholic school, we house the sacraments—we create a space and carve out a time so that the students may be placed in the presence of Truth as He gave Himself to us, and then we’re able to walk back to the classrooms and carry that on with us through the rest of the day.
Is this clear? How can it be. I’ve said it so badly. The very best school—the most lauded and the most prestigious school in the world—gives only insight and pathways to the truth, and this is contingent on the quality and character of its teachers. If we believe the tenants of the Catholic Church, if we believe that God is the Divine Architect and Christ is the Logic by which the world was fashioned, then the simplest, humblest Catholic (while still utterly dependent on the quality and character of its teachers) has the author of truth harbored in her walls. This makes the school almost an extension of
the tabernacle if the inhabitants if we say as the psalmist says, “Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth”, and have our hearts united.
One last attempt: a school is a bush—some have good leaves and flowering branches, and others because of bad roots are doomed to wither and die even if they look outwardly healthy. But the Catholic school is the burning bush, illuminated brightly and never consumed, not by its own power but because of something much greater than itself. In this way.
Or, better still, a school is like a mountain in a range—some impressive for their stature and grandeur, some impassable and inaccessible. But the Catholic school is the mountain that aspires to reach the stars. And the Sun, for love of the mountain that could never reach the stars by its own power, dips from the sky to come the waiting arms of the mountain.
Blaise A. Hockel, Headmaster