One Story: Lauren Tomasic

Can essence be quantified? And if so, what is its unit of measurement? For NDP, the answer is easy. What is essentially Notre Dame can be calculated by an accounting of each individual girl. Take NDP junior, Lauren Tomasic, class of 2014, for example. While I was interviewing Mrs. Chris Kaiser, the Dean of Students, […]

Chris Kaiser: Loving Tenderly

On any given day, a steady succession of girls parades in and out of the office of NDP’s Dean of Students, Chris Kaiser. As Dean, Mrs. Kaiser’s responsibilities include overseeing all student activities and schedules as well as enforcing the school’s disciplinary policies. So there are any number of reasons why a student might drop by…or […]

NDP After Hours

If you visit Notre Dame during normal school hours you’ll find yourself in the thick of things wherever you go. Every corner of the school hums with activity and there’s an urgency to every task. After hours the school has an entirely different vibe. It’s quieter, which is not to say dull. Still, walking the […]

Say Yes to the Dress

I am the oldest of four girls. We all went to NDP for high school. Because we’re all close in age, for much of that time my parents had 2 or 3 private school tuitions due in the same academic year (we also have an older brother who graduated from Loyola). That was a lot of […]

NDP Nerve Center

It’s an unpretentious little outpost. If you were to take a tour of Notre Dame, it’d be easy to miss. But tucked away on the lower level of the West Wing – in what used to be the old exercise room (and before that, the girls’ locker room) – is the very nerve center of […]

One Story: Meghan Stromberg

Currently, there are 739 girls at NDP. That’s 739 Works in Progress. 739 Unique Individuals. 739 Stories to Tell. There aren’t enough days in the year to tell them all. So…where to begin? Rather randomly, as it turns out. Which is not to say objectively. I spent a lot of time at NDP last year […]

Why a Religious School?

Before the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and the resulting tidal wave that washed over Indochina and Sri Lanka, I had never heard of the term ‘tsunami.’ Since that devastating event, however, the word has become part of my vocabulary and turns out to be the perfect metaphor for contemporary culture. A tsunami has a momentum […]

Blue and White and Green All Over

Consider this: If all 7 billion people on this planet consumed energy, resources, and materials at the rate we do in the United States, we would need 4 earths to accommodate that level of consumption and waste. In other words, it’s unsustainable. A lot of people have been trying to tell us this for quite […]

A Certain Je Ne Sais Quoi

For some reason, which to this day remains a mystery to us both, my good friend Patti Bailey and I were placed in an advanced French class upon entering Notre Dame Prep as freshman so very many years ago. Perhaps it was our grade school record that led them to make certain assumptions about our […]

The Age of Innocence

It’s getting harder to believe in innocence anymore. I’ve seen too many 6 year olds going on 16 and 16 year olds going on 30. What’s the hurry? The most popular TV shows among teenagers have titles like Pretty Little Liars, Gossip Girls, and The Secret Life of an American Teenager. Each has a plotline […]