Valentine's Day Music Presentations Parents Welcome
Tuesday Fenruary 12th
PreK For All Classes
9:00 AM
Mrs. Gonzalez - PreK-3
Ms. McGarry - PreK -4
Mrs. Serbones - PreK-5
Wednesday February 13th
Grades 1, 2 and 3 - 9:00 AM
Grades 4, 5, 6, 7 & 8 - 10:00 AM
Thursday February 14th
PreK-1 - Mrs. Fundora
PreK -2 - Mrs. Rodriguez
Friday February 15, 2019
Manhattan Region Teacher's Conference Day
PreK For All Open
No After School Program
2019-2020 Enrollment Calendar
February 6, 2019 - TADS re-registration begins for students entering grades K-8 in September.
Also students entering Mrs. Rodriguez's room in September (this is new) will be invited to re-register.
There will be no need to register as a new student as previosuly mentioned.
Re-Registration Fee - $150.00
Financial Aid applications open
February 15, 2019
Deadline for Financial Assistance Application
March 15, 2019
Financial Assistance Award Notifications emailied to families
April 15, 2019
Re-Registation Fee incentive ends.
Re-Registration - $250.00
Last date for Financial Assistance applications
Tuition for the 2019-2020 school year was posted on January 23rd. Please scroll down on the blog to see tuition rates.
Alba and Mr. Guzman will assist parents with their questions.
Alba is available to assist parent with the financial aid applications.
Follow us on social media!
Facebook: @olqmnyc
Twitter: @olqmnyc
Instagram: @olqmnyc
APPLY TO PRE-K FOR ALL
STARTING MONDAY, FEBRUARY 4!
The pre-K application for children born in 2015 opens on February 4, 2019
and the deadline to apply is March 15, 2019.
if you have questions please see Mr. Guzman about the
PreK For All Program
Monday February 11, 2019 Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes
Please check the Re-Registration calendar above - If you plan to apply for financial aid especially parents from Mrs. Rodriguez's class -- the deadline if FRIDAY February 15th.
Tuesday February 12, 2019
Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin's Birthday - two men who changed history - born same day and same year!
Valentine's Day Music Presentation -
PreK For All 9:00 AM
Mrs. Gonzalez's class PreK-3
Ms. McGarry's class PreK -4
Mrs. Serbones' class PreK -5
Parents invited.
Touring Tuesday
Wednesday February 13, 2019
ECKERS evaluation of the PreK For All Program.
Parents are asked to arrive on time for class as the evaluator would like to see the interaction between parents and teachers.
Valentine's Day Music Presentations
9:00 AM - Grades 1,2 and 3
10:00 AM - Grades 4, 5, 6 7 & 8
Coach will be working with students and teachers today.
e-sports competition between OLQM and Corpus Christi School
Thursday February 14, 2019 - Valenine's Day
Red Day. Students may wear Red shirt, skirt, pants and not wear their uniform
Valentine's Day Music Presentation
PreK-1 Mrs. Fundora's Class
PreK -2 Mrs. Rodriguez's Class
Reconciliation Class 3:15 PM - 4:00 PM
Friday February 15, 2019 - School Closed
Last day to apply for finanacial aid program - please see the calendar above.
PreKFor All Program OPEN
NO AFTER SCHOOL PROGRAM
Sunday February 17, 2019 - Holiday weekend
Studeents attend Mass with their parents
Monday - February 18, 2019 President's Day
School Closed
The
Challenges Faced by Young Adolescent Girls
“After years of social gains and with
bright futures within reach, why are things still so difficult for
middle-school girls?” asks editor Lory Hough in this article in Ed. Magazine. Despite significant
progress in K-12 achievement, college and graduate school enrollment, and
science, sports, and leadership, there’s a troubling rise in depression and
anxiety and decline in confidence among girls, especially as they leave
elementary school. Some of this was captured in the movie Eighth Grade, which follows 13-year-old Kayla through her last week
in middle school.
Bo Burnham, the film’s director, says, “There’s been a lot of
progress made, but the cultural pressures are still insane. And culture is what
leads you at that age, I think.” As he prepared to make the film, Burnham
viewed hundreds of teen vlogs and was struck that boys’ videos tended to be
about video games while girls’ were about their souls. “I think our culture
forces girls to ask deeper questions of themselves earlier than boys,” he says.
With boys, it’s What do you like to do?,
with girls, it’s Who are you?
This forces a transition from being confident, spunky, perhaps bossy
at age 8, 9, and 10, to something less sure in the early teens. As Simone de
Beauvoir wrote in 1949, “Girls who were the subjects of their own lives become
the objects of others’ lives. Girls stop being
and start seeming.” A recent study
showed that 67 percent of boys and 60 percent of girls said they were happy
with the way they were in elementary school, but that fell to 56 percent of
boys and 37 percent of girls in middle school.
Interestingly, African-American and Latinx girls fared better in this
study, with 59 and 54 percent, respectively, saying they were happy with their
middle-school selves. Girls of color seem less prone to anxiety, self-doubt,
depression, and self-harm, having built up a strong support group for one another.
Author Rachel Simmons believes white girls’ middle-school troubles
may stem, paradoxically, from the progress that’s been made. “We hope for girls
to be smart and brave and interested in STEM fields,” she says, “but we still
expect them to be sexually attractive and have a witty and appealing online
presence. No matter how many achievements they accrue, they feel that they are
not enough as they are… Girls are still raised with a psychology that is
trained to think about other people before themselves. This all is a real
recipe for unhappiness.”
There’s another dimension to this uncertainty and self-doubt. An
international study of 1,000 girls age 14-19 found that three-quarters said
they felt judged as a sexual object or felt unsafe as a young woman. Half said
they’d heard daily sexual comments and jokes from boys, and one-third said
similar comments came from men in their families. These messages also bombard
girls from the media. School counselor Joey Waddy says girls struggle “to match
the person they felt they were or wanted to be with the examples of celebrities
and social media
influencers.”
Starting in the early teens, says Lyn Mikel Brown (Colby College)
“girls’ bodies
become
associated with risk and constraint and warnings. Don’t walk home alone at
night. Don’t be alone with boys or drink with boys; be sure you know what’s in
that cup; be the sexual gatekeeper; don’t dress like a slut.” The messages boys
receive are quite different.
The other new factor in recent years is social media, which amplify
uncertainty and peer issues. This is especially true for girls, who spend more
than 90 minutes a day on their phones communicating with peers (compared with
boys’ 52 minutes, mostly chatting about playing Fortnite, not group dynamics). “Feeling excluded certainly isn’t
new,” says Hough, “but back when I was that age, if you weren’t invited to the
mall, you rarely found out, or you found out days after. And perhaps most
crucial: No one else shared your humiliation because only the people involved
knew about the slight (or perceived slight). Nowadays, seeing photos online of
your friends at Starbucks without you is immediate and very public. All of your
other friends see it, too.”
With Instagram, Twitter, and other platforms, says Eighth Grade director Burnham, kids are
posting photos and material revolving around What do I look like? and What
am I thinking? “Those are really baser, deeper, stranger questions,” he
says. “And the way kids interface with it, I think, changes the way they feel
about the world and themselves.” With idealized, carefully curated photos and
content, social media create “better” personas that cause problems in real-life
interactions.
“Most boys would never ask girls to lift up their shirts in real
life,” says school counselor Chessie Shaw. “However, plenty do online. Most
girls would never say such mean things about a classmate to their face, but
they do online… Because the poster has a much larger audience on social media,
any little mean joke can balloon into a much bigger event and can quickly go
from involving five or six girls to almost the whole grade… The chat is too
much a part of their social life. If they left it, they feel like they wouldn’t
have any friends, so they endure the comments and constant fights.” They’re
driven by FOMO – Fear of Missing Out.
The good news is that things get better for many girls in high
school, as they learn to handle social media and gain in confidence and
maturity. Social media can also be a platform for shy and socially awkward
girls to develop their voice, as Eighth
Grade protagonist Kayla did with her YouTube self-help videos. There’s also
a surge of social activism exemplified by Parkland shooting survivor Emma
Gonzalez and by many in the #MeToo movement. “The one encouraging thing I’ve
seen,” says Brown, “is more and more of my students becoming passionate about
these types of social justice issues… [M]ore than ever, we see women having one
another’s backs, and that’s a huge shift. Girls are watching and trying to make
sense of it all. The important thing is that they see there are different
perspectives and points of view and the power is shifting. That’s freeing.”
