Good Morning Wonderful Parents!!
I’m providing an update on our conversation with Bishop Jacques yesterday where we got a small group of “crunchy parents” together to attend a town hall with the Catholic Bishop at St. Peter’s in Beaufort. The reason the conversation yesterday was important is that we have been circulating this letter and petition to the Bishop for over a year requesting a change in school policy to start accepting Religious Exemption letters that would allow all children to attend private Christian schools in SC. To be honest it was pretty discouraging because we never got a response from either the Bishop or the Arch Diocese in Atlanta. Not only does the Bishop (based out of Charleston) determine school policy for the entire state of South Carolina but I also learned yesterday that there is a certain amount of influence they have on the Diocese of Savannah which covers the southern half of Georgia. Onto the update….
A fellow Crunchy Mom who is also a PEDIATRIC NURSE covered 90% of the conversation and she absolutely killed it. I felt like I was watching Senate debates take place and walked away super pumped to get this thing rolling again🔥
The ✅good news✅ is that this petition and our letters which were floating around last year WERE REVIEWED and it sounds like they have been a catalyst for serious conversation and consideration for policy change. The 🚫bad news🚫 is that we were told while the Savannah diocese is mostly on board for the change, the South Carolina diocese is split into 5 school regions and right now only 2/5 are on board for the change (including my wonderful Lowcountry) and all the regions need to be in agreement.
What can we do? Please circulate this message and the below petition to people in your network especially if they are in other parts of SC. They need to be reaching out to church leadership to let them know they want a change. This is a squeaky wheel situation so let’s get things rolling! 😎
Final shout out to the crunchy DAD who showed up to support us yesterday. He’s not a woman and isn’t Catholic but his presence added a lot of weight to our argument that ALL CHILDREN should be allowed to get a Christian education regardless of medical choices.