September 2009  

At St. Peter it is necessary to be able to do many things at once. Sometimes this means that the juggler receives a knock on the head.  Here is some information I should have shared with you earlier.              

Last spring--encountering and responding to the economic challenges of the moment--the Pastoral Center of the Diocese of Colorado Springs underwent a major restructuring and review.  Lines of governance and supervision were reexamined for the diocese and for parishes in order to facilitate and ease the working relationships of the parishes and the diocese. One little thing, unintended, that turned up in the review was that within the school system there exists little uniformity in the structure and responsibility of parish School Advisory Boards and equally of parish based Parent /Teacher Organizations.  Each parish was doing these things differently.  Each parish was experiencing some over-lap in functions between the two structures. And most parishes were doing one or another thing through these structures that swam a bit against either canon or civil law.  The problem being that board and PTO officers--volunteers intending to facilitate an informal, spontaneous auxiliary help-force--were left exposed because their positions lack the protection of any job-description or definition of specific responsibility.

The Diocese is drawing up and will approve through the office of the Superintendent of Schools guidelines for PTO and advisory boards to offer a uniform code of governance throughout the diocese. 

In the meantime, at St. Peter School, we would like Mrs. Schindler to have the chance to breathe. She has given us a magnificent running start this month. In the interview process, when we asked if she were prepared 'to hit the ground running, she could not have imagined all that we hid behind that innocent phrase. So while we await the new procedures, we are consciously in a posture of waiting. On receiving those procedures, I will constitute a St. Peter School Advisory Board in the second semester. We anticipate that the PTO will be placed under the umbrella of the School Advisory Board to demonstrate clearly the function of the PTO and that fund-raising and volunteer activity of the PTO are responsive to and directly contribute to the on-going mission and success of St. Peter School. 

Again, I should have found a way to communicate this to you earlier, but in a time of multiple transitions, sometimes the juggler finds a forgotten coconut delivering a crack on the skull.     

Fr. Schneibel, c.s.c.