Hello, my name is Connie Griffith. I am the chairperson of the St. Gabriel School Commission, and along with Dennis Dininger and Kerry Balding am a member of the West Deanery Unification Commission. Like many of you, we currently have children attending and children that have graduated from St. Gabriel. I personally graduated from here many years ago. Our love for this school is unwavering and like you we have spent a good portion of our lives and resources here. We will be sad when this school year comes to a close, but we rejoice in the knowledge that these changes, while difficult, will open the door for our children to experience an education that will become a model of educational excellence in the Archdiocese. Since this unification is new and unprecedented, it has created some misunderstandings. As a West Deanery Unification board member, I wanted to communicate this process.

The first phase was to unify St. Gabriel School and St. Michael School into one school for the 2010-2011 school year. We were to accomplish many tasks quickly in order to be ready for next school year. Those tasks were to appoint a new principal, create a tuition and fee schedule, approve a school budget, and provide guidelines for hiring teachers. The first task was to appoint a new principal of the unified school. With much deliberation, we chose two individuals, Sarah Watson and Matt Goddard, as co-principals. The reason was that the members of the West Deanery Unification Commission felt very strongly that we wanted individuals who understood and supported the K-12 model with the 21st Century Education. The Archdiocese actually suggested and is financially supporting a 2nd principal in order to accomplish our goals. We have created and published a tuition and fee schedule and we have already approved the school budget. As of this communication, Sarah Watson and Matt Goddard are working together to provide our school with the best teaching staff for our children’s education.

The second phase will start the 2011-2012 school year, when the elementary school with a new name (yet to be determined) will be joined with Cardinal Ritter High School to create the K-12 model. The schools will be under the direction and budget of Cardinal Ritter High School. This concept will continue to support Catholic education, provide educational excellence and prepare our children for a successful future both spiritually and intellectually.

We are pleased to announce that there is a new blog available on our website that will keep you up-to-date with all the latest information about our exciting new church building project. Currently it contains older articles from our homepage about the early stages of our plans including video of the public meeting where we approved the building project.

The latest entry is a link to a slideshow that shows floorplans, blueprints, and artist sketches of proposed stained glass windows for the new church. More photos and information will be coming in the weeks ahead.

The new blog is available at http://www.stgabrielindy.org/newchurch/.

You can always find the latest articles in the sidebar of this main webpage on the right-hand side of your screen under the title “New Church Building News”.