The Cathedral Eagle S.O.A.R. Award is our monthly honor for a student who displays...
Saintly Character
Organization
A+ Attitude
Responsibility
We consider this our school’s highest honor because this award is about the student: Students nominate fellow students they feel live up to the definition of what it means to be an eagle.
On May 14, 2017 Cathedral recognized Kolbe Villa with its SOAR Award. Kolbe was an 8th grade student at Cathedral who is the founder of The Dignity Ambassadors Leadership Program, highly involved in activities, and a tremendous role model to his siblings and school family.
The following presentation by Mr. Ekeler sums up Kolbe's accomplishments, and the reason for his SOAR selection...
Kolbe – you are up here today because you’ve done something nobody else at Cathedral has done: you’ve created three legacy projects that will extend way past the day you graduate. You also have one more that you’re working on.
A legacy project is something that is good in the moment, but is built to be even greater in the future. To build a legacy project means you are thinking about how you can help others around you, and also how you can help the hundreds or thousands who will come after you. Today, most people (adults included) don’t think about their legacy – they think about themselves or just what’s under their noses. It takes vision to understand that you can impact people you’ll never meet.
Eighteen months ago Kolbe and I began working lunches, as well as meetings during My Time and after school. Every meeting was focused on a leadership group that was specific to Cathedral. Kolbe hammered out a mission statement, the core values, and the Bible verse that ultimately became what you all know as the Dignity Ambassadors. That’s right, over a year before it was launched Kolbe was working on this vision, and today it has transformed the landscape of our school by putting students out front as leaders.
This past year Kolbe launched our first annual Pro-Life Day. This is something we desperately needed at Cathedral School because our parish is so strong in the area. We needed this day for the unborn to educate all the students, pray together, and become a stronger pro-life school. Kolbe designed much of this day, and it is now a day that will occur every year, touching hundreds of lives long after Kolbe will have departed our school.
Lastly, Kolbe and his colleagues have begun a project to create a pro-life prayer garden right by our gym door, near Soar the Eagle totem. This little garden will have an angel for those babies who were aborted, and another for babies who died before being born. Kolbe felt this calling after gaining an understanding of how many lives close to him were affected by miscarriages. The goal is to put this piece in place over the summer so that there is a peaceful place to remember the unborn.
