August 14, 2022
My Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
We will begin our new School Year this Tuesday, August 17. We currently have 84 students registered in our Pre School and 525 students registered in our K through 8 School. This is the largest
number of students we have registered for the last 10 years.
As with previous years we continue to make improvements with our School and campus facilities in preparation for the new year for our School and Religious Education Programs. This week’s column outlines what was done this summer and the hope for the future.
Thanks to the Raise the Paddle from our Marquee 2022, we replaced the lower-level west wing hot water piping with a variable volume terminal unit with a heating water coil in each classroom which connects to the existing ductwork. The hot water piping was installed during the Easter break. They completed the installation of the control system this week.
Our Home and School Association together with our wonderful volunteers made the update of our Teachers Lounge possible this year. We also renovated the restrooms by the cafeteria thanks to the generosity of our Men’s Club and Knights of Columbus. Other improvements made include the installation of a fence around our Early Childhood Education and Youth Center (made possible by 2 generous donors) and the replacement of the asphalt driveway with concrete.
We also installed an outdoor classroom on the east side of the gym and built a Grotto at the south side of our gym through two memorial gifts to our Parish. Unfortunately, we had the statue of Mary stolen two weeks ago. We will be replacing the statue in the near future if we are not able to recover the statue.
We continued to make improvements of our Parish grounds thanks to all the wonderful volunteers who made time to mulch, weed and clean up our Parish grounds – everything looks beautiful. While we had to remove some dead trees on our campus, we will be adding some more new trees thanks to a generous donor.
To make room for more groups to store their things, we have rearranged storage spaces as well as added new storage spaces. We will also be installing some new cabinets in our Future Sacristy this fall to accommodate storage for various prayer groups.
We managed to secure a loan from our Archdiocese to pay for the replacement of the HVAC units for our Church and the Cafeteria. One of the units arrived earlier than expected. We are waiting for the other unit to arrive before we can arrange a time to have them installed (Given the current supply shortage of HVAC equipment, we were initially told the equipment would arrive in November). As mentioned previously, the current air handlers for the Church and the Cafeteria date back to the time when it was first built in the 1960s and the condenser units are over 20 years old. We wanted to be proactive in replacing these units. We put out the replacement of the HVAC project to bid and unfortunately the lowest bid was $346,600. We were originally budgeting the replacements to be about $150,000. The loan provided by the Archdiocese would be over a 10-year period. I am currently talking to some leaders in our Parish to address this and other needs of our Parish.
Other items that need to be addressed is the roof of our Kenny Center, the resurfacing of our parking lot and the heating in the gym which is connected to the old steam piping in the school that we are currently replacing over a 4-year period (hopefully with the replacement, we can install air conditioning in the gym while at it). We have completed to replacement of the old steam piping of the lower level of our school this summer. We hope to replace the upper levels of our school’s old steam piping by 2024. The other item we are keeping an eye on is the Kenny Center HVAC system. While it is currently working well, we continue to keep an eye on it as it is about 20 years old.
This summer as you can see has been a busy summer. All these changes were made thanks to the generosity of so many and through the proper allocation of our Parish resources. We continue to do our best to maintain our campus and grow our Parish family. We thank you for your support.
God Bless
Fr Marc