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Contra Costa Marketplace - Feb 2016

St. Jerome Catholic School Celebrates Its 60th Anniversary If you walk on to the St. Jerome Catholic School yard on a regular school morning in El Cerrito in El Cerrito, you’ll see the things you’d see at any school: children scampering and chatting with friends; parents smoothing wayward locks and rushing off to work; faculty and staff keeping everything running smoothly. At St. Jerome, you’ll also see the particular routines unique to this school: each class, K through 8th, lining up in a half circle on the blacktop; student leaders taking the microphone for morning assembly; the entire school starting the day together with announcements, the pledge, and prayer. The morning assembly is one way this school has been building community since 1955. This year, St. Jerome celebrates its 60th anniversary of educating families in Contra Costa County. That’s sixty years of “developing minds, nurturing hearts, growing together” as the school’s tagline says. For 1st grade teacher Marcela Macchiavelli, who has taught at the school for twenty years, it also means sixty years of “creating a second home for students” and families. That’s how Mrs. Macchiavelli describes what she and her many St. Jerome colleagues do each day, week, month, and year. For her, that second home is what makes it possible for her students to learn how to be good citizens in the world. She has enjoyed watching her students do just that for the twenty years. By Monica alatorre She remembers one 1st grader, early on in her time at St. Jerome, who had a bumpy start to the school year. At the end of each day, Marco (not his real name) would try to take home the school supplies, not understanding they needed to stay at school. He challenged the rules and distracted his classmates. When the class would gather on the reading rug, he would cover his head with his sweater “like a turtle,” unable to read like his classmates. Mrs. Macchiavelli knew something needed to be done. She started a daily routine of pulling this student and a few others outside for devoted reading and learning time, relying on her assistant to run story time with other


Contra Costa Marketplace - Feb 2016
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