We invite you to consider nominating a program from your school for the 2026 Brother Michael Collins Award of Excellence. 

There are many amazing programs happening in our secondary schools across the Region and we hope we can highlight the many ways that we are bringing Brother Michael’s vision and legacy to life through our exemplary commitment to students in an urban environment; respect and appreciation for cultural diversity; love of music and the arts and improving access to education for the poor.

Our 2025 recipient, the World Away Program at La Salle College Preparatory in Pasadena, California, offers five pathway Centers of Innovation exploring medicine and health care; intercultural relations; film and media; linguistics; and computer science, robotics and STEAM careers. 

Completed online nomination forms are due by Wednesday, Dec. 17. 

Mark your calendars for our next LASSCA Conference, themed “Anchored in Faith: Leading Lasallian Schools Amid a Shifting Society,” at the Omni Houston Hotel in Houston, Texas, from March 1-4, 2026. Registration will open in December.

The Regional office kindly extends an invitation to LASSCA officers to attend the annual NCEA Catholic Leadership Summit (CLS) meant for Catholic superintendents of education across the United States. As LASSCA president, I had the privilege of attending the 2025 conference in Phoenix, Arizona last month with LASSCA vice president, Chris Fulco, and the director of education and formation at the Christian Brothers Conference, Sarah Laitinen. 

Our LASSCA team listened to keynote speakers and attended various breakout sessions seeking to recruit potential presenters and gather ideas for our own conference. By experiencing the NCEA CLS together, we can immediately discern whether their speakers and topics might be relevant to those we serve through LASSCA. Often, this leads to productive brainstorming for the LASSCA conference. While there, we also evaluate the conference format and structure looking for new ways to enrich the LASSCA conference.

Lastly but certainly not least importantly, we have a good time! In addition to networking outside of the Lasallian family, we get to enjoy the company of one another while visiting different cities across the country – something to consider should you one day be asked to serve as a LASSCA officer (wink, wink). Looking forward to being with you in just a few short months.

Attending the NCEA Catholic Leadership Summit reaffirmed for me the importance of providing our faculty and staff with formation that not only informs but reaches them personally, engaging them in innovative and meaningful ways that deepen their connection to our mission. I was also reminded that school leadership is more complex than ever, requiring presidents to remain constantly mindful of the stress our teams carry and intentional about supporting their well-being. Finally, the summit emphasized the spiritual necessity for Catholic leaders to “be still” and regularly enter the “classroom of silence,” nurturing our own interior lives so that we can more authentically share faith and zeal with those we are privileged to lead.  

• Building Staff Capacity to Support Growth in Students with Disabilities (Edutopia)
• Culture Is Built by Rituals (scmr.com)
• New Meditations on 12 Virtues (lasallian.info)
• Join Pope Leo's Digital Dialogue With Young People (National Catholic Youth Conference hosted by the National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry)
• Got Synodality Fatigue? The Cure Is Getting Good at It. (America Magazine)