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Greetings!
Blessings to each of you as we journey through this Holy Week!
This weekend, we completed our inaugural Move Your Feet 5K at Magnuson Park. Thank you to each of you who participated and for encouraging your school communities to take part. Being together was a visible reminder to the community at Annunciation Catholic that we continue to hold them in prayer.
In sharing about the event with Matt DeBoer, he offered the following: “This brought a lot of joy and hope here as I shared the event this week! We feel the love. We are honored and lifted up – 7 months in, what a gift. Thank you to all of you for your unceasing love, prayer, and support.”
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I am writing to personally encourage you to participate in a nationally representative study of leadership in Catholic elementary schools that is being conducted by our colleagues at the University of Notre Dame.
Your insights are critical to this research. By sharing your lived experience and perspective, you are contributing to the broader field of Catholic education and providing insights for those of us at the system level as we strive to better recruit, train, and support the next generation of leaders across all dioceses.
You should have recently received a survey invitation, and I ask that you please take time to complete it. If you did not receive a survey invitation, please reach out to Nik Filip at nfilip@nd.edu.
To ensure the results reflect the diverse geographic and contextual realities of our schools, every voice, including yours, is essential.
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If you haven’t already, please read the full update in last week’s Keystone. This is a reminder that we have made an adjustment to next year’s calendar. We have decided to repurpose March 5, 2027, as a centrally-coordinated PD&C Day. We continue to expect that schools will offer a Christ in the Classroom retreat during the second half of the year. We recommend using the day currently scheduled for PD&C Day for this purpose.
At a minimum, we ask that schools plan to provide release time for early learning staff on March 5 so they may participate in the STARS offerings. Thank you for your flexibility and for your continued support in strengthening professional learning across our schools.
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I pray you all have a blessed Easter. Thank you for the lived expression of the Resurrection visible through your school communities.
There will not be a Keystone next week with all schools on Easter break.
With gratitude,
NICHOLAS FORD | Superintendent
Office for Catholic Schools | Archdiocese of Seattle
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