Editorial

Notre Dame earns national recognition

Schools are usually associated with being the ones to hand out grades and awards. However, like the rest of society, they also are subject to performance evaluations.

Recently, Notre Dame Regional High School received special recognition for its overall performance, named a Catholic Education Honor Roll School, a national honor bestowed by the Cardinal Newman Society. We congratulate Brother David Migliorino and his staff for this recognition. The school has won this honor since 2005, which may wrongly lead some to believe that this distinction is commonly handed out among Catholic schools. However, less than 400 schools have received the honor nationwide since its inception in 2004, and currently there are 1,320 Catholic high schools in the nation.

In 2005, Notre Dame was one of 50 schools to gain the honor, and repeated annually until 2014, when it was awarded for two years to the top 5 percent of the schools nationally. The honor now carries a five-year distinction, and Notre Dame is currently just one of five schools nationally that have been approved for the honor.

"At this point we're in the top five which is a humongous thing," Migliorino said. The school has set a high standard for itself over the years in its effort to offer a well-rounded, Christian-based education for its students, both inside and outside the classroom. One of the more publicly visible areas the school has excelled is in the athletic arena, where it has made a name for itself as a yearly contender in multiple sports. In the 2016-17 school year alone, the school's girls soccer team and girls golf team won state championships, with the Bulldogs' golf squad boasting the girls individual state champion in Sarah Bell and the track team a state champion in triple-jumper Riley Burger. In fact, the school was awarded the Semoball Cup for the third time in four years, an honor that goes to the school in Southeast Missouri that has the most athletically successful year overall.

Other areas are not as visible to the public, but numbers show it has sustained excellence across the board. The school's 2017 graduating class was awarded 8.3 million dollars in scholarships. The school, which has 510 students this year, also has annual participants in mission trips as part of its Christian outreach. All sophomores are required to take Franciscan leadership classes, and the junior and senior classes contain 130 Franciscan student ministers.

It should also be noted, its current senior class contains three members -- JP Schuchardt, Jayna Timpe and Grant Wilson -- who have helped save the lives of two people with CPR in the last year. It's all a testament to the successful transition from adolescents to maturing, productive adults that's taking place on the campus.

We entrust the education of all our children to schools throughout the area, and some of those also have been noted for outstanding performance. We are truly blessed to have strong parochial and public schools here.

But this is a special honor for a noteworthy member of our community, Notre Dame Regional High School.

When it comes to scholastics, it always nice to make the honor roll.

Comments