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January 2023 Newsletter
Knightly Newsletter
St. Joseph Mission School San Fidel, NM
Happy New Year of 2023!
We pray for many blessings to be with you and your household in this new year. The school is filled with recharged energy from our Christmas break - and we are filled with deep joy as we continue to celebrate the birth of Christ. Before the Christmas break, our staff was able to gather to celebrate the accomplishments and graces with having finished halfway into the school year. During this gathering, we were deeply struck that we were all entrusted to carry on the work of the friars who established the school 100 years ago.
We enter this new year with humbleness, being very aware of how God our Creator has called us to serve right where we are. We also extend gratitude to our loved ones and mentors who have brought us to where we are now. We are guides in each other's lives.
Please enjoy our school Christmas video which shares captured moments in photo and recording of the blessings we received and shared throughout the Christmas season through the Red Shirt dance, and also through gifting a tree decorating and carol singing.
In this January Newsletter, we want to share about our academic achievements and opportunities from the school spelling bee to our STEM days, along with hosting our network school leaders, and honoring our community service members.
School leaders learning from each other
Our school was granted the honor of hosting a gathering of school leaders from our American Indian Catholic School Network through the University of Notre Dame. In these gatherings it is an opportunity to highlight the work and traditions of our school with educators who share a similar charism. Our school focused conversations on how to compassionately work from a trauma informed lens, led by distinguished speakers from the local area including Ms. Jennifer Nanez, LMSW and Tonya M. Louis, LMSW, PreK Director.
Our staff understood very early on that the visiting school leaders would also effectively be learning from our school's student leadership - to learn best how to serve the young people we have been entrusted to guide and care for.
Our network continues to seek expansion for Native American Catholic Schools to support each other in fellowship and capacity building.
"We had the best time visiting @mission_joseph for the AICSN Fall Leadership Summit! @RedCloudSchool @stjo1927 @dlsbsMT @SAIMWinnebago" - @WillatAce
SCHOOL OPEN HOUSE
As parents and families reflect about their child’s education for the 2023-2024 school year, we ask for you to consider St Joseph Mission School.
The school will be hosting our Open House on Friday, February 3rd from noon to 5:00 pm. This day event has a variety of opportunities to obtain information, sharing of firsthand experiences, and engagement. For enrollment in the next school year we have many scholarship opportunities available.
We ask support from our current SJMS families and supporters to invite a new prospective families to attend this event alongside you.
Honoring our Veterans today and everyday
The Village of Paguate has established a newly constructed Veteran's memorial dedicated in November of 2022 to the lives of the service members from the Pueblo of Laguna. The memorial was blessed by local leadership, our church pastoral leadership and has been recognized by the country with a gifted American flag that was flown over the Capitol. The flag was gifted to the memorial by Secretary Deb Haaland. St. Joseph Mission School's choir attended the commemoration event and dedicated a spelling song and performance for our Veterans, led by our director Mrs. Waconda
Attending the event on Veteran's Day was a wonderful experience to pray for the men and women who have sacrificed so much for the safety of our beautiful Nation.
As a school, we continue to honor our Veterans past and present by holding great honor for our flag every school day and displaying a yearlong wall of Veterans in our school cafeteria. We offer the opportunity to our school community to send forward pictures of their Veterans to be honored on the wall of Veterans at our school.
"The Little School that Can Technolize"
We are in deep gratitude to have been able to host Lisbeth Valladares and Khoa Le for a full two days of STEM workshops and presentations.
At St. Joseph Mission School we hold our mission as "Since 1923, St. Joseph Mission School shares the Gospel of hope through Faith, Academics, Culture, Environment, and Service. Through our Catholic Faith and local traditions, we strive to nurture the love of learning, with respect and dignity for all, and help students develop their skills to become courageous leaders in our local communities and beyond." The language most of the world speaks today is in technology.
We understand that co-curricular activities such as robotics and coding can provide opportunities for our students to see broader horizons in what their future can be. While receiving necessary experiences that will help them to better work alongside their peers in the education field.
Students enjoyed building their robot models and learning about the mechanics necessary to program actions and responses for their robots.
All students from Pre-K to 8th grade, were invited to interact and learn about opportunities of technology. At the end of the program, students competed in races and challenges.
Congratulations to our students on a successful week of stepping out of their comfort zone(s) and effective teamwork! We had a lot of fun learning and look forward to continuing on with the momentum of interest that has been fostered during this great program.
Spelling Knights
Competition can build objective to practice, and also excitement in challenge. Reading and writing have been marked as an important skillsets for reflective and critical thinking. Outside the classroom, we ensure to plan opportunities through University Days, Science Fair, and Spelling Bee competition for students to showcase the skills and passions which they are building.
At this year's school spelling bee competition, it was determined who would be representing our school at the District Spelling Bee - Max (8th grade) as our 1st place winner, Mikila (5th grade) as our 2nd place winner, Jalecia (7th grade) as our 3rd place winner, and Alanna (6th grade) as our alternate competitor.
We are so proud of all our students and their hard work in studying for this competition.
A big thank you to our teachers, families, and supporters who assisted us in preparing for the spelling bee! The county competition will be held at the Grants High School on January 25th. Please help us cheer on our students for this upcoming competition and this significant accomplishment, thus far.
Our 3 finalists and 1 alternate competitor student that will be competing at Grants High School. This year our competition judges were Curtis Steele, SJMS alumnus, Ingrid Peterson, SJMS alumnus, and Lucinda Trujillo, as our pronouncer. In this captured photo Mr Trujillo and Mrs. Waconda join in congratulating our students on this achievement!
We pray that you and your loved ones have had a safe and restful holiday. We invite you reply to this newsletter, and to let us know how we can pray for you, we would love to hear from you!
Please keep our school in prayer, for a successful review as we seek reaccreditation through the WCEA program.
Pax Et Bonum,
St. Joseph Mission School
St. Joseph, pray for us.