Welcome parents and students to Saint Mary’s High School, home of the Eagles. Thank you so much for taking an interest in learning more about our community.

My name is Phil Lehmann. I’m the head of guidance here at Saint Mary’s High School and, in part, that means I am also a guidance counsellor at Saint Mary’s High School. We have seven guidance counsellors and those guidance counsellors are assigned to students based on the student’s last name. On the current slide, you can see the guidance counsellors for this year and what alphabet they have been assigned to for the students. From year to year those alphabets change slightly, but for the most part we try to keep them as similar as possible. Ideally, your guidance counsellor would be traveling with you, so to speak, through your high school career and what we do is we try to help you with your classes. We try to help you with your programming and scheduling in the current year and in the years to come. And we also look with you with insight, excitement and anticipation towards the post secondary opportunities for you. So when you get to high school you will have a guidance counsellor.

I want to talk a little bit about the document on the screen: Entering Secondary School. That’s a book that will actually be distributed to elementary schools sometime in early December. It is the hope to get this book out to elementary schools so your son or daughter will have this book to look through. Please ask them about it. It is something that they might might not open eagerly right away, but it is packed with lots of great information. I’ll talk later in the slides about guidance counsellors joining virtually grade eight classes and talking through this book with students. So this book talks about getting ready for high school, graduation requirements of the Ontario Secondary School Diploma. It touches on course selection and when students in Grade eight need to select their courses for Grade nine. And it has a great section with frequently asked questions.

Speaking of the year and when the connection points are with the grades in high school, guidance counsellors and the transition team – student success, link leaders and Link Crew coordinators – we do make our way out to the elementary schools in a normal year. This year we will be joining the schools virtually, specifically guidance in the month of January, to talk through this entering secondary school book. If you look at the graphic on your screen right now, you’ll notice that there are several connection points in a standard year for grades to be connected. To learn more about the high school experience, for example, having a transition course in the summer called Bridge to Success or doing Skills Builders through Saint Louis. Those are two examples that you can see most likely on the graphics. So these are just connections throughout the year and ideally their purpose is to make the transition to high school for grade eights easier.

All students are achieving or planning to achieve Ontario Secondary School Diploma, Ontario Secondary School Certificate or Certificate of Accomplishment on the screen. Right now is the diploma and the requirements for it. I won’t get too into too much detail at this point in time. You can see the list there. In the pathways presentation that will be provided for parents to view at their leisure in January 2021, that will be something that gets into more specifics about what what is entailed inside of the Ontario Secondary School Diploma, Certificate or the Certificate of Accomplishment. Specifically, if you’re a student, you’re wondering what do I have to take and what do I get to choose to take in grade nine? There are six courses that you take: English, French, geography, science, math, and religion. Those are compulsory courses for Grade 9. So in myBlueprint, when they make their selections, they will choose the level at which they would like to take those courses. They are then given two choices. The two elective choices can come from categories like Arts, Tech and Physical Ed and Business. You can see the courses listed on the screen. Students take two of those. The cool part about that is that they are choices, but you do need one Phys Ed, and one arts for your OSD in the end, so your choice could actually end up helping be helping you get a compulsory credit. In the end, there’s lots more details with that as well, but also a part of the pathways presentation in January coming.

Finishing up, I’d like to just mention that we do have a final course selection due date of February 26, 2021. Grade eight students access myBlueprint and they work on their high school plan in myBlueprint and make their selections through that software. So the date you want to mark in your calendar is February 26th, 2021.

As we part ways right now, I would like for to encourage you to visit our Future Eagles section of our website. That’s where you can examine or just have a tour, a virtual tour of more of the departments in Saint Mary’s and get an idea of what the what the school is all about from department to department. Thank you for taking the time to learn more about our school community here at Saint Mary’s. We really believe that Where Kindness Matters, Community Grows. We’re very excited to see you in September 2021. Thanks again.