St Marys versus St Louis
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Anonymous
| Wow. The honor roll poster is really at loose ends today. Multiple posts, one right after the other. A whole new school year is upon us and they haven’t gotten that list from last year published yet. The pressure is mounting! Can they do it! |
Anonymous
| Diocesan teacher here. Middle school to be exact. It is not so simple as expelling students for bad behavior. Teachers are instructed to handle as much discipline in classroom as possible. A lot of issues stem from behavior expectations not reinforced at home. Recommendations on improving teachers is good; however, there is not the budget to hire people for these roles. There are huge recruitment efforts, but low turnout for hiring events. Also, BSM is highest paying school in Diocese. So, money doesn’t buy job satisfaction. The policy of accepting students with disabilities is wonderful! I am a parent of a child with autism and a child with Down syndrome. A general classroom teacher at a Catholic school is not trained in how to teach that population. We are stretched very thin. I am not at St. Louis or BSM but have first hand knowledge of how the principal treats his teachers and admin team. Trust me, when you see such a huge turnover in teachers, look at the principal. Teachers can only tolerate so much. The work load is mind boggling. My public school teacher friends say I work twice as hard as they do. In at 7:30 till at least 5. You can plow through if you have principal that is supportive and treats you as a professional. Otherwise, you will not keep your admin team or good teachers. |
Anonymous
| Lots of announcements so far from st Mary’s about mundane silly BS. But still nothing about honor roll. |
Anonymous
Stay angry |
Anonymous
The 2023-2024 school year is over. |
Anonymous
| St Mary’s used to teach and emphasize hard work, competition, excellence, and fair play. What happened? Now it’s all about catering to mediocrity. |
Anonymous
Why are you still there? Happy new school year! |
Anonymous
|
Whining about st Mary’s not publishing honor roll (a decision that I agree is idiotic) is like complaining about the food on the Titanic. Or complaining that the Jurassic Park gift shop doesn’t carry souvenir mugs with your name.
Parents there have much bigger fish to fry. |
Anonymous
Like what? Has anything changed for the better at St Marys so far this school year? |
Anonymous
| There's been a mass exodus of qualified staff over the past 18 months. |
Anonymous
| What is student-teacher ratio in each school? When do aides become floaters vs being in a single class? |
Anonymous
|
I teach at a Catholic HS in NoVa and the St. Louis students are historically weak in math and do not do well on the math placement exam, so we have parents mad because their kids got As in 8th grade math and cannot do well enough on the exam to skip a
algebra, although they say they took it in 8th. |
Anonymous
Not a St. Louis parent. To be fair, that exam is ridiculously difficult. One of my children had a 98-99 all year in Algebra at a strong DoA middle school, great performance on the Diocese-produced final exam, and only scored a 77. Another kid had close to 600s on the Alg 1 VA SOL, high 90s on the HSPT, yet didn't come close to passing. Meanwhile, the math actually TAUGHT at the Diocesan high school is way too easy. Child took Honors Algebra 2/Trig in 9th grade, had a 99 for the final class grade, yet was never taught some of the basic Algebra 2 concepts that appear on the SATs and wasn't required to memorize formulas. At the time child said they were learning in Algebra 2 some of the concepts that were tested on the Algebra 1 exam. Had to self-teach with Kahn Academy and finally caught up to the SATs in "Honors" Pre-Calculus. There are serious problems with that math placement exam, that the content and expectations aren't making it down to the K-8 teachers to get the students ready, and that the exam is testing at levels far, far above where the high school actually ends up teaching. |
Anonymous
| The funniest thing about the honor roll comments is that the policy hasn’t changed at all. The honor roll was published every trimester last school year. The principal and AP even took pics with the students and posted on social and the weekly newsletter. So this parent was trolling or doesn’t read email or social. |
Anonymous
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Maybe they can hire a permanent 8th grade ILA teacher? All these annual fund donations are supposedly going to “new teacher recruitment efforts” but no one knows what that means!
Hire an ILA teacher — it is mid-October! |