Catholic School Teacher Connects Students Nationwide in Support Effort for Newtown

Jack Wallace, a high school teacher at Holy Cross of San Antonio with the University of Notre Dame's ACE Teaching Fellows (ACE) program, has experienced, energized, and taught the power of a caring community by his reaction to the recent shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT.

As a result of conversations with fellow teachers in Texas and a much broader outreach to other Catholic school teachers through Facebook, the people of Newtown will soon receive hundreds of letters of compassionate support from children in Catholic school classrooms around the country.

Jack, a member of the ACE 19 cohort, hails from Fairfield, Conn., a short distance from the site where 27 children and adults were gunned down on Dec. 14. The shock hit Jack close to home for several reasons, partly because he has friends from Newtown who attended Catholic high school with him.

After learning of the tragic deaths, he approached his fellow teachers living together in the San Antonio community with the idea of having his students write letters to Newtown expressing their grief and sympathy. The other teachers affirmed the lesson in sharing one's love and building the Body of Christ. They not only supported the idea, but said they would do the same in their own classrooms. One colleague suggested using social media to spread the idea nationwide.

 "I told them, if you want to make it more real for your kids, you can tell them these letters are literally going to be handed to somebody your teacher knows, and he'll hand-deliver them to Newtown," Jack explained later. He has learned online that teachers from Washington, D.C., to Oakland, Calif., invited their students to put their thoughts on paper and sent those messages to the home of Jack's family, where he planned to arrive on Saturday, Dec. 22, for Christmas break.

"The support has been unbelievable," he says.

His plan, as of the one-week anniversary of the tragedy, was to wait until a couple of days after Christmas and then take the letters—along with some financial contributions made in San Antonio—to Saint Rose of Lima Parish in Newtown.

"It would be absolutely incredible to walk up to Monsignor [Robert] Weiss, the pastor, and say, here are a thousand letters from Catholic schools all over that really support you and the town," comments Jack. "Anything that can uplift a town like that is really worth doing."