I will be away from the parish for a couple of weekends so I am writing this column a week in advance. I can tell you though that our Parish School opened at the beginning of this month to many smiling faces. We enjoy having the children back for another year and we are grateful to the wonderful staff that we have which not only provides an excellent academic education but also an atmosphere of faith where we can pass on the message of the Gospel. We welcome a couple of new teachers. Judith Waszkowski comes to us from St. Francis de Sales & will be helping the students stay fit in the gym. Traci Rath-Detwiler will be teaching art and computers. She will also be working one day a week in the Parish Office as our Marketing Director. With all the competition we face due to so many other schools in the area, we really need to get the word out that St. Leo’s Parish School offers unique advantages to the other options out there. So we welcome both of them and all of our returning staff members. Many parents made positive comments about the brightness & cleanliness of the school building so again thanks to all who donated to have that work done over the summer.
I hope you take a look at our new website found at leothegreat.org. That address (“URL” in computer speak) is much easier to remember than our older one. It’s also a brand new site with a lot of information that we will be keeping updated and fresh. On our “homepage” you can find highlighted upcoming events, links to the pastor’s blog (which includes my weekly bulletin column & short homily notes) as well as links to several current events.You can read the weekly bulletin, download our newsletter, and see pictures from our parish picnic and the St. Leo’s Seniors’s group. So please visit the site often. It is also formatted to fit well on a mobile device such as a cell phone or tablet, using their web browser. By now our new mobile app should be available as well. This is a free app that can be found on the Apple iTunes Store for iPhones and on the Google Play Store for Android phones. We will post links to these on the homepage of the website as soon as they are available. For those of you who do not have or use computers or smartphones, this is probably all Greek to you. No worries. Though our parish is taking advantage of the latest technologies available for communication, we are still using the tried & true parish bulletin, also recently updated with a fresh look. Either way, our goal is to do our best in keeping you informed.