Don’t say Notre Dame Sister Margaret Farley is retiring. “That would mean I wasn’t going to do anything else,” said Sister Margaret, 81, who formally left her position with the Office of Catholic Schools after 44 years on June 3. “Say I’m resigning.” As for what she’ll do, Sister Margaret isn’t quite sure. It will start with a three-week trip back east to visit with members of the Congregation of Notre Dame in Rhode Island and with family in New York. After that? Probably some kind of volunteering that would extend her more than 60-year career in Catholic schools. “I used to be a reading teacher, so I could do that,” she said. “I could teach young students to read. But not five days a week, and I wouldn’t want to be paid.” Sister Margaret grew up in New York, attending Catholic grade school in Queens and high school in Manhattan, at a school run by the congregation she ended up joining. Once the thought of becoming a religious sister occurred to her, she said, it just didn’t go away. Her younger sister knew she was considering a religious vocation and “blabbed” to their mother, who was ill, Sister Margaret said. “My mother asked me to wait a year, because she thought she might be better,” Sister Margaret said. But her mother died just a couple of months before Sister Margaret graduated from high school. She ended up attending college on Staten Island for one year before joining the congregation. Sister Margaret started her teaching career at Notre Dame de Chicago School, where she was assigned for five years. “Great kids,” she said of the diverse school. “Great parents, too.” Then she ministered in Connecticut, Vermont and New York, before coming back to Chicago to work in the archdiocesan schools office. While she had a variety of jobs, she worked mostly with principals as director of school personnel, helping them staff their schools or helping them reduce staff size when enrollment decreased. A statement from the Office of Catholic Schools lauded her “vast knowledge of OCS and faculties surrounding our system throughout her years here.” That knowledge base will be missed, officials said. What many people don’t realize, Sister Margaret said, is there is a shortage of qualified teachers, and it can be hard to hire and keep them in Catholic schools, which pay less than their public school counterparts. “Also, if you teach in a Catholic school, chances are you’re going to have to teach religion,” she said, adding that teachers have to get their own formation to do that. “There is a lot of support for them.” Principals also are very supportive of one another, Sister Margaret said, and if a school closes or has to reduce staff, other Catholic schools generally try to hire those teachers. “We have had schools close or have falling enrollment,” she said. “But we’ve also had some others that are exploding.” Principals, she said, need to be aware of the need to groom good teachers to be school administrators. “A lot of them are doing it,” she said. “Either for their own schools or for the system.”
Students at Chicago Jesuit Academy learning culinary skills On a Tuesday afternoon in January, about 20 students in fifth through eighth grade at Chicago Jesuit Academy, 5058 W. Jackson Blvd., crowded around Chef Sebastian White at a table in the cafeteria for their weekly culinary lesson.
St. Ferdinand students pack 300 lunches for people in need Students at St. Ferdinand School took time out from their classes on Jan. 27 to make 300 packed lunches to feed people in Chicago over the next 24 hours.
Josephinum Academy making plans to stay in Wicker Park Josephinum Academy of the Sacred Heart, a 134-year-old high school for girls, is hoping to take control of its future with an agreement to buy the property on which its facilities stand and launching a capital campaign with a goal of $23 million.