Letter from Our Principal

September 2023

Dear Catharine Family,

Welcome to the start of the 2023-2024 school year!  As a member of the J.W. Catharine family, I am excited to re-launch all of the learning, community, and connection that our students, staff, and families expect from us.

Our school leadership team, in addition to our teachers and other support staff, have worked extremely hard over the summer to develop and enhance our learning program.  Our planning for our educational experience is based on our guiding principles:

Ensuring the health and safety of all scholars and staff
Protecting our mission and vision
Being adaptive
Keeping  relationships close
Communicating intentionally

As we begin to work together we remain focused on two goals:  to protect learning and to promote home and school connectedness.

Protect learning- our goal is always to ensure that students continue to learn and develop.  It is critical that we continue to hold ourselves accountable with engaging students with rigorous curriculum and high quality learning tasks that are paired with high quality instruction.  We know that there has been unfinished instruction from the spring.  Therefore, protecting our time with our students then becomes even more important.  We will protect our time for students by providing instruction that contains the elements of effective teaching practices with time for student individualization.  We are also committed to protecting teacher development as well- we provide weekly opportunities for teachers through  professional learning, collaboration, and data analysis so that we are prepared to provide the best possible experience for our scholars.

Promote home and school connectedness- we see the value in our connection with students, families, and with each other.  We will continue to connect with families through personalized calls home, parent conferences, consistently updating our website, and increased use of our social media pages. We want to keep you updated on the most recent and important information. Therefore, please check out our website Joseph W. Catharine  which provides more detailed information regarding our instructional and safety procedures.

We look forward to partnering with you this year.

Ms. Lisa Wilmer, Principal

Mrs. Emilie Burton & Mrs. Marianne Kennedy Assistant Principals