MISSISSAUGA, ONT. - At St. Marcellinus Catholic Secondary School being part of the improvisational theatre team takes more than just being funny.

Aboriginal adults in northern Ontario are getting a second shot at completing their high school diploma through their local Catholic school board. The Northeastern Catholic District School Board’s ACCESS Program is offered in four centres in the board’s vast area from Moosonee on the shore of James Bay down to Cobalt in the south.

TORONTO - Canadian Jesuits International (CJI) is bringing social justice teachings to high school students as part of its new Youth for Others program.

MISSISSAUGA, ONT. Singing is faith in action, says Nancy Bodsworth, writer and performer of “Together in Faith,” the theme song for Catholic Education Week 2013.  

TORONTO - In a variety of ways the past year has been a strange one in publicly funded Catholic education. This should not surprise us. We will always be a “sign that will be contradicted” (Luke 2:34). Nothing daunted, we carry on in our mission, confident in our abilities and with a profound reliance on the guiding power of the Holy Spirit. We are a successful, efficient, co-operative school system with an unbroken history going back more than 175 years.

TORONTO - Ontario’s Catholic teachers are asking provincial Finance Minister Charles Sousa for freedom — freedom from bureaucrats, freedom from standardized tests, freedom to teach all kinds of students from four-year-olds to special needs kids to adult learners.

MISSISSAUGA, ONT. - When the doors of St. James School reopen next September, students will get a global perspective on the world while maintaining a Catholic presence in the community.

TORONTO - For the second consecutive year Annaleise Carr, the youngest person to successfully swim across Lake Ontario, has been honoured as an Ontario Junior Citizen of the Year.

LONDON, ONT. - What does it mean to be a Catholic university in this day and age?

For the second time, the provincial government has taken over one of the province's Catholic school boards.

The Windsor-Essex Catholic School Board is the latest to fall under provincial control after an external review found board staff was willing to risk a strike to balance its budget. The board's budget was short $2.2 million this year, the fifth time in the past six years it had failed to balance its books. Staff noted that a strike might help to find those savings.

The board had no contingency plan to find the savings, said Deloitte, the consultants who authored the review.

Norbert Hartmann, who oversaw the Toronto Catholic District School Board when the province took it over in 2008, has been appointed to oversee the Windsor board's financial management and administration.

Barbara Holland, chair of the Windsor board, had predicted a takeover was coming in early August. She told The Catholic Register's Evan Boudreau that it wasn't so much financial instability, but more of a retaliatory measure for the board filing for conciliation to resolve the collective bargaining difficulties it was having with its teachers (before the province introduced its Putting Students First legislation Aug. 27).

"I do feel that it is a retaliatory measure and it is retaliation because we spoke out on this issue," said Holland.