July 19, 2020
My Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Our parish has redesigned our website that was launched last week. Please check it out – www.moqchurch.org. With the launch of the new website, we have also introduced a new logo for our Parish. Our new logo is inspired by the stained-glass window in our Church. The Crown symbolizes the Queenship of Mary. Using the crown keeps Mary as our focus and provides us with a totally unique and singular visual symbol that comes directly from our own Church building. The logo also creates a continuity with the existing school logo utilizing the same overall shape. The circle is a universal symbol of unity that reflects on the wonderful community of Mary Our Queen Parish. We would like to thank Katie Sommer for designing both our Parish and our School logo. Our Old Parish logo was taken from our bulletin publisher’s set of graphics that was made available to us. We eventually requested for permission to use that for our Parish logo. With that in mind, we wanted to have a logo that we could call our own.
With the advice given to us from a focus group that met on June 30th, we are continuing working on our plan for opening our school and religious education program. The focus group consisted of members of our School Board and members in our Parish community in the medical field and various other specialties. Our focus group provided great insights on matters involving logistics and planning, curriculum and instruction as well as our Catholic identity and social and emotional awareness so that we are to begin school in person and to follow our school calendar as closely as possible. We are doing our best to be proactive in planning ways of effectively opening and operating School and Religious Education Program under possible restrictions imposed by the Nebraska governor, the Nebraska Commissioner of Education, the Douglas County Health Department, and the Archdiocese of Omaha.
This week we communicated the reopening plan to our School parents. We are also in the midst of planning for the opening of our Religious Education Program on September 2nd. Because of the need to properly disinfect our classrooms so that we can transition from our 5-day school to our Religious Education Program on Wednesdays, we have made changes to our Religious Education Program this year to a single session program beginning at 5:30pm on Wednesdays. We will provide more details soon.
We continue to be excited on the progress of the building of our new Early Childhood Education and Youth Center. We continue to promote and market our new Early Childhood program and continue to register more students over the last few weeks.
There are several ongoing improvements that are currently going on in our Parish Campus. The installation of the new windows in our school are currently being done. We will soon be starting the replacement and repair of the shingles of the roofs of the Parish Center, Kenny Center and our Church as the result of the hail damage last year. We have moved ahead with the replacement of the air conditioning units of our School which was damaged by the hailstorm last year. The other reason why we needed to replace the air conditioning units in our school is to provide fresh air intake so as to improve the air quality in our school and to help the spread of the coronavirus.
We concluded our financial year on June 30th. I would like to continue to express my gratitude to all who continue to support our Parish. Your support continues to help us meet our financial obligations, especially the salaries of our teachers and staff of our parish. Our Parish is dependent on our Sunday Collections that pay for the running of our Parish (Tuition for our school covers about 50% of our school budget. Our Sunday collections make up the difference). We were about 18% less in collections this fiscal year or about $350,000 under budget this year. Thankfully, the PPP loan helped us meet our commitments for the last financial year. We are doing our best to make things work. Once again, thank you to all who continue to support our Parish.
We continue to encourage everyone to follow the guidelines as indicated by our local authorities. For those using masks in Church and continuing to follow the social distancing guidelines, we would like to thank you for doing so. We will continue to fine tune our procedures and provide more details on how everyone is to be seated via email, on our Website and Facebook account.
We continue to send you our Weekly Updates via email. If you have not received an email, kindly call our Parish Office and we will add you in our email mailing list.
Please keep in your prayers all those affected by the coronavirus especially – those in the medical profession, those who have lost their jobs, those whose pay checks have been affected by the public event limits, the businesses impacted by the virus and the love ones we can’t visit because of the social distancing that is requested from us.
God’s Blessings,
Fr Marc