Opening Day

Tomorrow we begin again.

The Opening Day of the 103rd school year on our current campus.

All is in readiness.

Everyone involved is at home tonight thinking and dreaming and hoping and worrying and planning and remembering and longing for a peaceful, wonderful, memorable year. There's a little melancholy too - another summer gone, darkness is coming earlier and the light later, and the intensity of the coming school year looms large. For some, tomorrow is the first day of high school. For some, tomorrow is the first day teaching in a new school. For some, it is the beginning of the end - ah, those seniors. Tonight is the night - tomorrow we begin.

We begin again at SSA -

St. Scholastica Academy. [http://www.scholastica.us/ ]

We are a Benedictine college prep academy for young women in Chicago. We're ever-ancient, ever-new...to borrow Augustine's [tomorrow's his day!] description of his experience of God. We're as young as the newest freshie [freshman, in more exclusive language] anxious to begin. We're as old as the oldest Benedictine Sister with whom we share a house, a school, and an experience that cannot be replicated elsewhere. SSA is a place, a people, an event, that must be experienced to be fully understood.

Tomorrow is my first day of school too - first day of school as the 17th principal of this Benedictine academy on our lush, spacious, astoundingly beautiful Ridge Boulevard campus. I hope to share the journey of this school year from my new perspective. I have been around SSA for awhile, but with new responsibilities comes new insight.

The Rule of St. Benedict informs what we do and how we are at SSA. In Chapter 3 he insists that the community members - all of them, even the very young - be called together to offer counsel to the leader of the community.

What would you say to a new principal?
What would you say to our youngest freshie?

Ready to go back to school?

What wisdom have you to share?