Growth and Growing Pains: 'It's A Wonderful Life' [12-10-07]

This past weekend, another first: It's a Wonderful Life, a joint production featuring nine JPII students, met with real success. In established schools, freshmen are not often given significant responsibility in drama productions -- mostly, frosh receive general chorus parts and are told to watch and learn. Not so in this case: JPII students, most of whom had little or no prior theatre experience, had some heavy lifting. And they did great.

It's a hard and necessary lesson for young people to learn what it really takes to be successful and what real effort is all about. Our young students and even families chafed under the demands of a full production schedule. Coming into final dress rehearsal, the show's overall success was by no means assured. These are the growing pains. A terrific final result, on consecutive evenings following the Hyannis Stroll, is the growth. I'm proud of our thespians for rising to the challenge.

My name is Chris Keavy and I am the Principal/ Head of School of Pope John Paul II High School. Welcome to Brick by Brick, a new blog sharing news and perspective from Cape Cod's new and only Catholic high school. So many across Cape Cod have been following our story with interest that I welcome the chance to give a glimpse of our growth, challenges, and accomplishments. Your responses, suggested topics, and questions are most welcome.

Today is day #65 in the life of our school, having opened for our first classes on September 4, 2007. Much has been accomplished getting us to this point. So much more is still to come. Go Lions!