The Mission at St. Mary’s School is to provide a Catholic environment that instills academic excellence while preparing the whole child for life-long personal and spiritual growth, empowering them to become global citizens.
St. Mary’s Catholic School’s focus prepares our students for whatever is next in their educational path. In addition to providing a high quality Catholic education, St. Mary’s expands our students’ experience to include Spanish Literacy, Music, and Christian leadership. Collectively, our approach to a holistic education creates a foundation in support of our mission and demonstrates our passion for providing our students with a culturally relevant education.
St. Mary’s is committed to targeting our academic efforts to maximizing the students’ potential.
Our commitment to Spanish literacy extends beyond the acquisition of language skills. While learning the structure and nuances of Spanish are incredibly valuable as a course of study, our focus is on creating and encouraging a school culture that recognizes and values diversity. The diversity includes language, dance, traditions, food, customs, as well as celebrations, both religious and secular.
Our commitment to Music extends beyond the classroom activities. In addition to a progressive music appreciation course, St. Mary’s offers extracurricular learning opportunities including Beginning Band, Advanced Band, and Choir.
St Mary’s students in grades 2 through 8 will complete MAP assessments in the areas of reading, language arts, science and mathematics twice annually. The tests will provide feedback to the students, staff and families as to each student’s current level of achievement in the various disciplines as well as tracking the growth of our students individually and collectively. The goal of the assessment is to measure and analyze our students’ growth, not achievement.
The decision to utilize MAP assessments as a tool in our school is one piece of our overall strategy to evaluate and improve our learning effectiveness. Teachers will participate in regular training sessions with NWEA to learn and understand the reading, deciphering and interpreting testing reports and results.
The MAP testing will provide normative data allowing us to assess our students against a local and national student population.
NWEA provides ongoing training sessions to the teachers to aid in the administration of test and report analysis to help with future action planning for individual students and collective grade levels.