Curt Sidorski, Ministry Lead of Marianist Encounters at St. Mary's South Side, St. Louis, MO, sends us the school's goals and plans for the current academic year.
St. Mary's has a tremendous partnership with the St. Joseph Housing initiative, a group that saves and rehabs aging housing stock and creates affordable housing opportunities for families. In addition to being housed in the St. Mary's building, our students contribute numerous hard man-hours to help with demo and rehab tasks. Our school is also fairly tremendous in the department of needs-based scholarship and aid.
We currently have a few things in various stages of planning and implementation for the upcoming semester. We have begun dedicating one meeting a month for our Marianist LIFE student team to encounters focused reflection, education, and action. These student leaders have helped us devise two Encounters-centered goals and initiatives that were important to them.
1: Many of our students have immigration as a significant part of their recent family history, with many being first-generation themselves. The students want to put on a multi-cultural festival to celebrate our collective diversity and show particular love and support to those members of our community who need it.
2: We have a visible, and perhaps growing, unhoused population in our neighborhood. The students wanted to build and maintain a little food pantry stocked with essentials that anyone could access. It would be a small but meaningful way to serve this need directly.
In addition to these student-developed goals, we are working toward the following:
Going plastic-free at staff events.
Building a community peace and nourishment garden. The hope is to grow produce that can be used for our monthly cooking club.
Removing invasive honeysuckle from our campus is ongoing.
We have partnered with the local non-profit Trash for Trees to plant new native trees on campus, and our students earn service hours to maintain them.
Dr. McIlwee and Ms. Harden have spearheaded partnering with MSD Project Clear to mark over 70 area storm drains in the Dutchtown neighborhood with signage about the effects of illegal dumping on our watershed.
Our new campus minister, Miss. Seise has been laboring tirelessly to set up service opportunities for our students. There has been preliminary discussion of more closely aligning and logging our service hours based on the categories: Serving the poor, serving the Earth, and serving the youth.
Our fine arts teacher and MIT member, Ms. Sorgea, has coordinated a collective peace pole art project that our whole campus participated in creating. We will have a dedication and prayer service for peace sometime next semester.
Dear Curt, this is a wonderful project! Thanks for helping to make it work. It makes me proud of St. Mary's Southside and of its faculty and students!