Student Life

Activities

St. Mary's has many annual events and activities. From holiday festivities to exciting campus guests and  field trips, St. Mary's students enjoy many learning experiences outside the classroom.

Accelerated Reader

Accelerated Reader is a reading incentive program established at St. Mary's in 1996. It is designed to encourage children to read outside the required curriculum, improve reading skills, and develop a love of reading. St. Mary's parents can find detailed information about the program in the Accelerated Reader folder on Saints Portal.

Student Council

The Student Council is made up of Middle School students elected by their peers to plan activities and events for the school. Some of the big events include Spirit Week, the annual food drive, themed out-of-uniform days, and Middle School dances. An Annual Food Drive for Metropolitan Ministries, Feeding Tampa Bay, or End 68 Hours of Hunger Tampa is sponsored by the Student Council every year in November to donate food for the local community.

Special Grade Level Activities

Beginning in Fifth Grade, St. Mary's students enjoy a series of overnight trips designed to enhance cooperative effort and promote trust and team building. These trips bring the participants closer together as a class, and they have become highly anticipated by all the students.

John A. Shepard Field Day

John A. Shepherd was the Headmaster of St. Mary's from 1980-1991, and Field Day is named in his honor. The student body is divided into two teams, Gold and Blue, competing against each other in outdoor activities and the Knowledge Bowl on Field Day, in addition to participating in a variety of competitions throughout the year for additional points on their Field Day final score. Go Gold! Go Blue! Go Saints!

Sports

Having varsity and junior varsity levels in most team sports allows maximum participation for students. The current no-cut policy places athletes on the team where they can be the most successful. Coaches all come from within our school community and most teams play in the Florida West Coast League made up of 12 other private schools. St. Mary's has an outstanding history of league and tournament championship teams. In addition, St. Mary's has been the proud recipient of the league sportsmanship award for eleven of the fifteen years since its inception!

Boys Season Girls
Soccer September - October Volleyball
Cross Country September - October Cross Country
Basketball November - January Basketball, Soccer, Cheerleading
Track and Field February Track and Field
Tennis March - May Tennis
Baseball, Flag Football  March - May Softball, Flag Football

 

Community Service Projects

Students participate in community service projects each year at St. Mary’s. It is important for our students to learn the value of serving others in their community and to learn they can make a difference in the world. The community service projects are listed below by grade level.

8th Grade:
Students work at Faith Café (provides meals to the homeless) twice a week. They set tables, serve meals and drinks, and clean tables. (http://faithcafetampa.com/)
8th graders also participate as Primary Class Leaders twice a week. All 8th grade students will participate in a done-in-a-day outreach project, such as volunteering at a Title 1 school or working at LaVoy Exceptional Center, where they paint, landscape, and help beautify the campus. (http://lavoy.mysdhc.org/)

7th Grade:
Students deliver hot meals to shut-ins twice a week through the Meals on Wheels program. Meals on Wheels is a non-profit agency that provides nutritious meals to homebound persons, usually the elderly or handicapped. The project is rewarding both for the students and the people we serve. The students gain satisfaction by helping others, and the meal recipients truly enjoy seeing the students. (http://www.mowtampa.org/)
The seventh graders also lead an annual school-wide Penny Drive in the spring to help the pediatric clinic provide for the daily needs of the children of Papoli, Uganda. The clinic is a project of the non-profit group Village Partners International (VPI). It provides nutrition, counseling, and health care to the thousands of children within walking distance of the facility. Over the past few years, St. Mary’s Penny Drive has annually raised approximately $3500, which feeds the patients for a month. (http://www.villagepartnersinternational.org/)

6th Grade:
As many as 250,000 children deal with hunger in the Tampa Bay area. The sixth grade class learns about food insecurity in their hometown and takes action by collecting breakfast foods like cereal, breakfast bars, and oatmeal in the spring as part of Feeding Tampa Bay’s Cereal for Summer program. Students devise and implement a school-wide food-collection campaign, making posters to hang in school, creating videos for the morning show, and talking to classes in order to ensure that a child in need has a nutritious breakfast every morning in the summer. (https://feedingtampabay.org/)

5th Grade:
The 5th grade will partner with the Make-A-Wish Foundation. The partnership will include learning opportunities for the students and will provide valuable support for a mission-driven, local charity. The 5th graders will lead a letters to Santa campaign in the winter and will sponsor a group for the annual walk-a-thon in the spring. (https://wish.org/)

4th Grade:
Students support the Clothes To Kids. The mission of Clothes To Kids (CTK) is to provide new and quality used clothing to low income, school-aged children, free of charge. It is the goal of CTK to provide each eligible child (K thru 12) with a week’s worth of clothing. All underwear and socks are new. All other clothing is a combination of new and quality used clothing. CTK must constantly add to our inventory to ensure every child leaves the store with a complete wardrobe. (https://clothestokids.org/)

3rd Grade:
The third grade students will partner with the Junior League of Tampa to support their Community Service Diaper Bank Program. The Diaper Bank collects disposable diapers to support a variety of nonprofit agencies throughout Hillsborough County. These donations allow agencies such as the Healthy Start Program and Guardian ad Litem to disperse diapers to those in need. The third graders will meet with representatives of the Junior League to learn about the need for diapers and the impact the donation will have on their community. Students will advertise by creating informative posters, collect, and sort all the school-wide donations. (https://www.jltampa.org/)

2nd Grade:
Students donate animal food, supplies, and old t-shirts to make dog toys for the Humane Society of Tampa Bay. (https://humanesocietytampa.org/)

1st Grade:
Students put together craft bags and write letters for sick children at St. Joseph's Children's Hospital. (http://www.sjbhealth.org/home_childrens.cfm?id=585)

Pre-K and Kindergarten:
Students learn about Metropolitan Ministries and participate in a year-
round food and toy collection. (http://www.metromin.org/)