How One Senior Lives Out the Mission Inspired by NDP’s Founding Order
Every morning during the week of October 20, Notre Dame Preparatory School Senior Taylor Foltz shared stories about the School Sisters of Notre Dame (SSND) over the morning announcements. They told of courageous women—from as far back as 1833 to as current as 2023—who have been grounded in faith, motivated by mission, and inspired to change the world.
The stories Foltz shared were part of a week-long buildup to Friday, October 24, SSND Foundation Day, when the NDP community joined together at liturgy to celebrate the order that founded our beloved school. This year’s SSND Foundation Day was also marked by a historic first for NDP and the SSND: the school’s first lay leader in NDP’s 152-year history, Dr. Angela Allen, was officially installed as the 10th Head of School.
For Foltz, coming to know the values and mission of the SSND have helped focus her own spirituality, which she says “took off” once she arrived here as a seventh grader out of public school. Her first semester at NDP was spent at home because of COVID; most other students came back to campus after the first quarter that year, but Foltz elected to remain home the full semester because of some family health matters. As evidence of God working through the NDP community, she points to the moment when she, knowing no one, arrived on campus in January 2021 and was instantly welcomed.
“All were genuinely there to help me adjust,” she says. “And I think that’s because faith grounds [the NDP community.]”
For Foltz, the SSND values imbued in NDP’s mission foster faith, inspiring all to strive for transformation, much like the sisters—many of whom are well beyond traditional retirement age—who persist each day in their ministries, demonstrating, “It’s never too late to enact change.”
Foltz is active in numerous NDP service clubs, participates in the school’s Campus Ministry program, and volunteers extensively with her parish, St. Ignatius of Hickory, where she is a peer minister and has traveled to Appalachia on three service trips. Next year she plans to attend a Catholic college where she will study chemistry and business with the intention of one day creating a company providing affordable, natural, and ethically sourced skin care products. “I want to root my business in faith, everything from the products to the packaging.”
The SSND have provided the grounding for Foltz, who sees their mission of women-centric education and care for the environment as tenets that not only she, but everyone, regardless of personal faith, can get behind and live out daily.
“The SSND ground their principles in universal values.”
