It’s never too early to start planning for Christmas. It’s also never too early to be inspired by a heartwarming Christmas story.

Every Christmas season, a group of students at Father Mercredi High School in Fort McMurray plan, organize, and oversee their annual Santas Anonymous campaign — a program that raises funds and collects donations to provide children and families in need with a holiday hamper that includes toys, a grocery store gift card, and additional support for infants or seniors. The program is over 30 years old, and it’s run by the students with the support of school staff.

“We begin planning and fundraising in October of each year,” says Santas Anonymous Coordinator Jennifer Pope. “We do many fundraisers, such as a teddy toss with the local AJHL Oil Barons hockey team, an annual market in which we rent tables to local vendors, a pancake breakfast, a Middle School dance, and more.”

Read more: Santas Anonymous: A 35-year tradition of student-led charity

With recent elections in Ontario and Alberta, along with ongoing challenges to Catholic education in Canada, the national landscape has shifted dramatically in the last year. Dr. Robert Murray, Managing Director of the Government Affairs and Public Policy Practice Group at Dentons Canada LLP, will be explaining what that means for educators at all levels and what we can learn from these national trends in his presentation entitled The Politics of Catholic Education in Canada.

“It’s important for trustees and administrators across the country to make sure that they recognize that local decisions are never simply local,” says Dr. Murray. “They can have both provincial and potentially national consequences.”

Dr. Murray’s presentation will help attendees see the parallels and connections between seemingly disparate things going on across the country. He says it can be easy for individual school boards to assume that they are the only ones dealing with an issue, when that’s almost certainly not true.

Read more: Dr. Robert Murray added as presenter at CCSTA AGM

A local “Toonies for Tuition” campaign will ensure that young people in unfunded Canadian provinces receive a Catholic education.

On April 29, Chairperson Patrick Daly, along with secondary student council presidents from the Hamilton-Wentworth Catholic District School Board, presented a cheque for $29,498.45 to Marino Gazzola, President of the Canadian Catholic School Trustees’ Association (CCSTA) for the national Toonies for Tuition Initiative. Toonies for Tuition (CCSTA Charitable foundation) provides tuition assistance to Catholic students in provinces that have limited or no public funding for Catholic schools. 

Commending and thanking students, staff and parents for their generous support of the campaign, Daly explained that, unlike Ontario students “who are blessed to have publicly funded Catholic education,” students in unfunded provinces have to pay the cost of tuition out of their own pocket.

Read more: HWCDSB raises close to $30,000 for Toonies for Tuition