Welcome to Seton’s 49th Year!
First Day of School
Wednesday, August 23rd
Arrive at School 8:15
- Junior High Students report to Faustina to receive your class schedule cards.
- High School Students report to the Gym to receive your class schedule cards.
- Once you have your schedule all students should report to the Gym for the opening school assembly. PLEASE NOTE: some changes may have been made to your schedule, please follow the schedule that is on your card.
- 1st DAY IS 3PM DISMISSAL!!
What to Bring on the First Day?
- Backpack with Notebook/Paper, Pens/Pencils, File Folder for handouts
- Lunch (No hot lunch will be sold until Monday, August 28th))
Important Reminders for Drop off and Pick up and for our Student Drivers
We have to remember that we are in the middle of a neighborhood, and therefore we want to be respectful of our neighbors. There are a couple of things that we ask of you to help make picking up your children a smoother experience for everyone.
- Please communicate with your children the night before on when and where you will be picking them up. As you will notice, there will be a lot of kids outside at once, so if they know when to expect you, then hopefully they will be ready to jump in.
- When pulling into the parking lot, please pull all the way forward to the beginning of the lot.
- We know it may take a minute for your child to find you and get in, however, if part of your carpool has to go find the other children, then we ask you to be considerate to the long line behind you and circle around. When the flow comes to a dead stop, our school traffic completely blocks Maple street which is not good. We want to stay on good terms with our neighbors.
- Please, never park your car in the carpool line and come into the school. If you have to come in, we ask you to park in a parking space or down the street.
- Please DO NOT drop off or pick up your children in the adjacent streets. Not only does this hold up the traffic, but more importantly, it is unsafe to have kids crossing the streets in the middle of traffic.
- Please speak to your kids about looking before they run in front of the cars in the parking lot.
- Drop off should not be made before 7:45am. The first bell always rings by 8:15.
Start of the School Year Announcement from our Director
Dear Seton Community,
Happy Feast of St. Stephen of Hungary. May we all strive to replace modern ideas and attitudes with authentic Christian culture. As summer slips away, the teachers and staff of Seton School are preparing and looking forward to a new school year. I would like to take the opportunity, in these last few days – the calm before the storm, to make you aware of a very important issue related to technology and also encourage you to attend two wonderful events.
After attending a conference addressing the negative potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) software on the learning environment, I wanted to emphasize the need for parents and teachers to collaborate in order to ensure our educational process at Seton is not disrupted by this technological advancement. We strongly recommend that parents discuss with their children the numerous issues with using AI to complete assignments and put filters on their home computers to block access to AI sites in the same manner that explicit sites are blocked.
The faculty at Seton are investigating the best plagiarism and AI detection sites available to identify when it has been used. Alsoall classes will have a minimum of eighty percent of the class grade based on in class evaluations. All research papers willrequire sources to be turned in to establish accuracy in citations.
Please mark your calendars and plan to attend these two events:
Saturday, August 26: Seton will be hosting a talk on campus related to the issues of human trafficking illustrated in the recent movie “The Sound of Freedom.” A number of prominent speakers on the topic will explore the problem and discuss ways to combat this growing evil. More details to follow.
Saturday, September 16th: .Support the Mother of Mercy Free Medical Clinic by attending a wonderful event at the Hylton Center. The event will feature comedian Jeremy McLellan. Drinks and heavy hors d’oeuvres will be served and some of the key figures in the creation and growth of the Clinic will be honored.
Jeremy McLellan is a rising star in the standup comedy world, honored as a New Face of Comedy at the prestigious Just for Laughs Comedy Festival in Montreal and has completed sold-out tours in the US, UK, Canada, and Pakistan. Last year he was awarded a Teaching Fellowship at Bishop Barron’s Word on Fire Institute where he released a 7-part course on Comedy and the Catholic Life.
It will be a great night to celebrate the Mercy of God and the awesome work of this ministry in our own backyard. Get your tickets for this event here: bit.ly/3QYnpmP
Please express your gratitude to Mr. Scheetz, Mr. and Mrs. Pogue, Mr. and Mrs. Witter, Mrs. Ciskanick and Mrs. Salas for all the work they have done preparing the school buildings and the course material for the upcoming year. Thank you for sending your children to Seton and participating in our community.
Take Care and God Bless – Bob
Start of the School Year Reminders about Dress Code, Cell Phone Policy, and Tardiness
Please check over your Seton wear. Donate clothes that are too small to the Seton uniform closet (Corpus Christi Office) for others to benefit. Make sure skirts are long enough to cover “most or all of the knee”, pants are not too tight and shirts are long enough to stay tucked. Shop the Uniform Closet if you need to update. Our Dress Code reflects personal discipline and modesty.
Hair should look natural and neatly styled, no extreme or fad hairstyles, no hair wraps or hair tinsel, boys’ hair should be above the collar and no longer than four inches. Boys are to be clean-shaven.
In general, Shoes are to be dark dress shoes and not have “white, sneaker-like soles”. Please review the Seton Handbook for all the specifics on hairstyles, shoes, outerwear, etc. “The sacrifice and effort required to adhere to a uniform dress code policy on a daily basis is an outward expression of the discipline necessary for academic success and spiritual growth.” Please know that demerits are given for uniform violations and students could be sent home.
Remember to be familiar with the Seton Cell Phone Policy (found in the Seton Handbook). Our emphasis is on face-to-face relationships, not face to phone. Help us keep Seton a generally phone-free learning environment.
Please be diligent in arriving on time or early to school and Monday Mass. Demerits can be given for being late or tardy as this disrupts the learning process. Teachers and students are in the Seton Chapel Tuesday – Friday at 8 am saying the rosary and all are welcome.
Let’s encourage one another in charity, humility, patience, obedience, and this year’s virtue; gratitude. We are looking forward to a great school year and the opportunities that await us to not only grow academically but more importantly to grow in holiness and intimacy with our Savior Jesus Christ. See you soon!
A Message from Our Executive Director
WELCOME to Seton’s 49th Year! 2023-24 will be a year of planning and preparation for our Golden Anniversary Year. You will be hearing from the planning committee from time to time. One of the activities already underway is to request monasteries and convents of nuns to pray for the entire Seton community—past, present, and future. These nuns are the powerhouse of the Church, and we are grateful for their prayer support.
GRATITUDE: A THEME OF THIS YEAR OF PREPARATION: We must not be like “the other nine” lepers who did not return to give thanks after Jesus miraculously cured them. Seton survived in the first place and is flourishing today solely because of God’s grace. I am deeply grateful to all the human instruments—parents, teachers, students, benefactors of all kinds—who have heroically responded to that grace. But it is God’s grace that came first. I would ask every one of you reading this column to commit to adding one Glory Be to your daily prayers in thanksgiving to God for His blessings and mercies. Too simple to be significant? If everyone in the Seton community says this prayer with heartfelt love, a great chorus of thanksgiving will rise to the Holy Trinity every day.
OUR VIRTUE OF THE YEAR: Gratitude has been appropriately and wisely chosen by the Student Government Service Committee as Seton’s virtue of the year. To help focus our grateful thoughts, I will be taking a tour through Seton’s history each month of this school year, highlighting events, people, and clear examples of God’s grace during a five-year span. I begin in this August issue with the preliminaries to Seton’s opening and the first five years, September 1975-June 1980. Watch for the list in a special box each month. Learn about Seton’s history and see why we have so much for which to be grateful. Click HERE.
SPIRITUAL PREPARATION: The most important way we can prepare for our Golden Anniversary (or for that matter, anything else of significance) is spiritually, to grow in an intimate relationship with Our Lord. Each quarter we will encourage an important spiritual practice, which will be family oriented but will also be encouraged for individuals. I sincerely hope that every family, every individual will take these opportunities to grow in love of God. The priests who have served Seton over the years have told us that we must put spiritual growth first. If we don’t, we are building our house on sand, and you know what happens to such a house. You will soon be receiving a Jupiter message with information about the first quarter spiritual practice.
INTELLECTUAL FORMATION: To my knowledge, Seton is the longest-serving independent Catholic high school in the nation. We were in the vanguard of a mission which is now shared by many schools; namely, academic excellence in a thoroughly Christian environment. This educational movement is chronicled in a recent book, The Battle for the American Mind by Pete Hegseth with David Goodwin. Seton teachers were asked to read this book over the summer, and now I am asking parents to read the book as part of our preparation for the 50th anniversary year. In a nutshell, the book discusses the crisis in American education, in which public education, and much of private education, has been hijacked by secular liberals, who are anti-Christian and are destroying any kind of true education. I will be highlighting some points from the book during the year, but I really hope you will read the book itself. Used copies are available at a low price, and you can share copies. Some of you may even want to organize small-group discussions of the book. The authors don’t say much about Catholic independent schools and don’t realize that Catholics were in the field before non-Catholics, but that doesn’t undermine their arguments and their research. All of us need to know why Seton’s mission is so important and why it must be upheld no matter what.
Getting ready!
The faculty and staff are praying for all of you as we begin this new year!
