Sandusky Central Catholic School

One of the outstanding fruits of partnering with Virtue = Strength over multiple years is watching your students grow into virtuous leaders.

We start by teaching the students the virtues and how to embrace Catholic Identity but that can grow over time to our students taking the lead as they share what they have learned over the years and then "give back" to their fellow students.

Sandusky Central Catholic (Ohio) is a PreK-12 Campus of about 550 students and has partnered with Virtue = Strength for over 10 years.

Head of School, Ryan Wikel, recently shared some of the amazing mentoring opportunities his student-leaders have developed.

Here at Sandusky Central Catholic, grades 6-12 are divided into 6 Houses. The Houses are named after Saints and the students remain in the same house throughout their career at SCCS. Each day, houses attend daily convocations (15 minutes). At convocations, we have different activities and guest speakers and the focus is on living a virtuous life. Each month, we celebrate a different virtue with our entire school.

We also complete 2 community service projects a year where houses are at 25 different locations in the Sandusky area offering service.

In the month of March, we celebrate March Madness! Each House competes in daily games during convocations and the house with the most points at the end of the month get to spend a day at the Cedar Point Sports Center.

Our Houses also celebrate "House Mass" 2 times a year. This is on a normal all-school Mass day at the church, the house stays back on campus and celebrates in the chapel. After Mass, they enjoy breakfast and conversation together.

One of the favorite activities for our elementary students is when our houses have mentoring days. Once a month, our 6-12 grade students go to the elementary and partner up with an elementary student. Together, they work on an activity that promotes the virtue of the month. This activity is about 45 minutes and follows an all school Mass. Often, our students that are paired up also sit with each other at Mass that day. This builds culture across our campus and gives our younger students someone to look up to!