Exams before Christmas break, resilience programs, choice of summer reading, world language department, and the STEM program are all changes coming to John Carroll in the 2012- 2013 school year.

“The Resilience Program will be a good opportunity to get things done before classes begin.”  Ball said.

The Resilience Program is one of the bigger change coming next year.  The program will take place on the first day of school and will be orientation for everyone, not just freshman.  It will be a full day where students will get their school pictures taken and go through “resilience training.”

Resilience training will be addressing things such as cyber bullying, drugs, and alcohol.  Everyone will be split up according to their class and gender.

This will also be the first year John Carroll will provide a choice of summer reading.  “We decided to have 3 choices because our main goal is to have students enjoy summer reading,”  English teacher Matt Blair said.  “There is a vairety of chocies so everyone could pick something they like.”The books were chosen by the summer reading committee.  There were about seven people on the committee and each person submitted five titles.  From there, the choices were narrowed down to the last three.  The choices for this years summer reading are “The Art of Racing in the Rain” by Garth Stein, “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightime” by Mark Hadden, and “Heaven is for Real” by Todd Burpo.

“The central theme of the three books is the idea of perspective.”  Blair said.  “Each book is written form a unique point of view.”

Also, in the coming school year, John Carroll will be changing the name of the Foreign Language Department to the World Language Department.

“We don’t consider these languages to be foreign, because a lot of it is also spoken in the US,” Principal Madeline Ball said.  “We are changing the names because it better reflects our global perspective.”

Caitlin Wolfarth is a reporter for the Patriot and jcpatriot.com