Catholic Education

TORONTO - About 500 Catholic parents, pastors and teachers in Toronto staked a claim on the future of Catholic schools in the last of a province-wide series of consultations by the Institute for Catholic Education seeking community insight into future directions for Catholic education in Ontario.

TORONTO - The average full-time elementary school teacher in Ontario’s Catholic system is putting in a 55.7-hour work week, and what counts as a part-time teaching job averages 36.8 hours per week, according to a new study commissioned by the teachers’ union.

TORONTO - Special education, religion and history teacher Donna Marie Kennedy is leaving her current job as president of the Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association with the conviction that social justice is the cornerstone of her union’s existence.

TORONTO - Which religious traditions get support from publicly funded schools is going to be an issue in Ontario’s Oct. 10 election, promises Ontario Progressive Conservative education critic Frank Klees.

St. Jerome’s University has appointed Dr. Peter Naus as its next chancellor.

TORONTO - Anna Zappone stands less than four feet tall holding a beach-ball sized model of the Earth and its atmosphere. She’s no scientist, yet. But she’s figured out a thing or two about global climate change.

MISSISSAUGA, Ont. - The award-winning novel Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson is back on school shelves for Catholic students in Dufferin-Peel west of Toronto.

TORONTO - As Ontario’s high school chaplains try to figure out a new name for their job that fits canon law, they’re also making a bid for some respect. And they’re starting to get it from the province’s bishops.

TORONTO - When the Basilian Fathers let slip that they won’t be appointing any more of their men to positions at Saskatoon’s St. Thomas More College it was no great shock to anyone in the Catholic education community. You can’t appoint men who don’t exist.

TORONTO - For many, Toronto’s St. Michael’s College School is known as one of the finest all-boys Basilian high schools in Canada. But for others, who may not know a rosary from a rose garden, the St. Mike’s name means just one thing: hockey.