St. Margaret of Scotland Families:

Just a reminder that this Friday will be our first half-day of the year.  We use these half-days as a way to have teacher meetings and provide professional development for our teachers.  One of the goals of the five-year strategic plan was to create a school-wide behavioral management system that provided clarity and unity from grade to grade. We also wanted to base this system on restorative practices. 

We chose to use the ‘Restorative Practices Playbooks’ as a guide for how to implement restorative practices into our school.  The Restorative Practices Playbook states that “Restorative justice work is social justice work”.  This tool provides teachers with practical strategies to encourage belonging and connectedness between community members. These practices are used to help reduce conflict and handle conflict in productive ways.  The goal is to have classrooms that function in predictable ways with predictable routines facilitated by a teacher who is kind and trustworthy.  

The administrative team received initial training in Restorative Practice this summer.  On Friday, we are bringing in an expert on Restorative Practices to observe classrooms and train our teachers.  I look forward to this professional development not only because it is part of our school-wide goals, but also because it fits in so well with our Mission of Catholic education.

God Bless, 

Patrick Holley