Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas vacation. We are off to a great new year and look forward to the second half of our school year. The month of January is filled with exciting events. We begin our registrations so please look at our news letter for important dates. On January 30th we begin our Catholic Schools Week celebration. Please join us for the 6 pm Mass for our opening ceremonies.

We are proud to announce that two of our students have received academic scholarships to high school for doing so well on the Tampa Catholic Entrance Exams. One of these awards was the highest award amount given by Tampa Catholic High School for making 100% on the entrance exam!

Mrs. Utroska, a former teacher of ours is the Panama Missionary liaison to our school. She will be traveling with other parishioners to bring our prayers, resources, and good wishes to our Panama friends. We would like the children to see the connection to bring an actual missionary and how we are called to support the missionary work of the church. The money in our children's collection envelopes during November and December will also be used to financially help support this mission trip.

Each year we are asked to submit three annual goals to the diocese based on our School Improvement Plan (SIP) that was completed in 2006. We recently shared these goals with the Advisory Board and would like to share them with you. If you recall when we completed our SIP in 2006 our two goals were: To help children learn to reflect on their work for the purpose of improvement and to help students take risk in their learning. These goals are then broken down into measureable objectives. After reviewing our ITBS scores the three goals we will work on this year are:

• At least 80% of our students will increase their ITBS Math computation skills by 5%.

• At least 80% of our students will increase their ITBS Spelling skills by 5%.

• Using the Math Minute Program teachers will help 80% of the students increase their accuracy and speed by 10 percent over the school year.

Over the course of the year you will see the many learning activities your children are being exposed to in order to achieve these goals. Prior to school opening our teachers participated in a two day workshop on our Math Program in order to help our students reach our goals.