We celebrated a Memorial Mass for Bernadine Grice last Friday, October 4th. She was described in the obituary in this way: “Bernadine absolutely loved life and loved her family and friends the most!” What a blessing to be full of the joy of life that comes from those who love you. May she Rest In Peace.
We welcome Connor Durell who is being baptized this Sunday. May God bless his parents who will be for him the first and best teachers in the ways of faith.
Enclosed in this bulletin is the Summary Financial Report of St. Leo’s Parish & School which we make available to you every year at this time. Instead of a separate letter to accompany this report, I have a sense that most would prefer simpler rundown which will easily fit in this bulletin column. Some people enjoy looking at the details of such reports and others ask only for the bottom line. So I’ll leave that to you but here’s the bottom line if you’re the less detailed type: we are about where we were last year in terms of our bank balance. We have a very healthy balance of $1,422,684, and this may surprise you given the expensive repairs which we have had to deal with the last couple of years, but these are offset by the consistent increase in the number of students in our parish school. This number is very close to our ending balance of this past fiscal year. We have 2 classrooms for the new kindergarten class as we did last year. While this requires additional teachers and staff, it still allows us to use the extra revenue on repairs associated with the school, such as the work that was done on the school roof and the parking lot used by the school parents who drop off and pick up their children daily.
As you know the roofs of our Parish Community Center and Church building were both replaced (not just repaired) during this past year as well. These were our most expensive capital improvements not only of this past year but of the past few years. In the rectory and office building, we completed the replacement of all windows with more secure, energy efficient ones. In the school building, a new Junior High floor was installed and we converted the athletic storage room above the gym (the old choir loft of the first church!) into an Art classroom. And of course our yearly repair of the three parking lots are included in last year’s expenses.
It is always our hope that we can increase our balance each year and hopefully that can finally begin to happen during this new fiscal year. But I feel very fortunate that our yearly increase in school enrollment, and the steady income from our weekly collections have allowed us to balance our budget each year without major capital campaigns being necessary. Our largest projected expense for this current fiscal year will be the replacement of the metal beams which support the roof of the gym (Lux Hall). Please feel free to see me or a member of the Finance Council with any questions and thank you again for your continued support.