Five years after his own ordination into the permanent diaconate, Deacon Fuad “Fred” Totah has begun the role of director of diaconate formation for the Archdiocese of San Francisco.

When Natalie Cirigliano Brosnan graduated as valedictorian of Mercy High School Burlingame in 2002, school shootings, student anxiety and depression were an anomaly. Social media, with its well-documented influence on both, did not yet exist.

When the time came for Sandy Grees, an incoming junior at Sacred Heart High School in Atherton, to do her final class project in social ethics class this year, she remembered the 2017 headlines about the humanitarian crisis in Southeast Asia caused by the violent displacement of Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar, a predominantly Buddhist country.

Margaret Anne McGowan was in seventh grade when she began playing the church organ at St. Paul, her family’s parish in San Francisco’s Noe Valley. The weekend before she died on June 20 at age 87 she was still at the organ bench of the church where she was baptized in 1932, married in 1953 and finally mourned on June 25.

St. Peter School in San Francisco’s Mission District ended the academic year on a very high note this year, with students of the 140-year-old K-8 school experiencing the highest growth in reading and mathematics scores since a new learning strategy was introduced four years ago.