FAQ

Families who seek a faith-based education for their sons can find an environment at St. Thomas where spiritual faith is nourished alongside academics, athletics, and student life. The campus ministry program is designed to develop strong moral and ethical thinkers who grow into servant leaders and impact the world.

Through our campus ministry, your son can explore and grow in his faith. We offer service projects, retreats, and daily faith formation opportunities, which will help him develop the knowledge, skills, and character to be a good and moral individual.

We offer a wide variety of faith formation opportunities with the goal of helping our students to grow closer to God. Programming includes weekly Adoration, Mass, Confession, and Young Life. In addition, we offer all-school mass on Holy Days of Obligation.

The House System at St. Thomas High School seeks to enrich school culture, enhance school spirit, provide opportunities for student leadership, promote fellowship, and facilitate pastoral care for all students. The eight smaller communities are designed to cultivate strong bonds of brotherhood and support between students, faculty, and staff while exemplifying goodness, discipline, and knowledge.

Within the overall structure of the House System, the STH community meets weekly in Communio. Communio builds on the genuine mentorship and community established at Camp Aquinas. During Communio, our students are supported academically, emotionally, physically, and spiritually, which allows them to reach their God-given potential inside and outside the classroom.

St. Thomas offers five mandatory retreats with the sole purpose of helping young men discover who it is that God created them to be. Each retreat is unique in its own right and offers different activities that challenge students to think about their relationships with their neighbors and God. We also make it a priority to offer the Eucharist and time for confession on each retreat.

• Freshman Retreat: Camp Aquinas
• Sophomore Retreat: Pick Up Your Cross
• Junior Retreat: Father-Son Fall or Spring
• Junior Retreat: Leadership Retreat
• Senior Retreat: The Great Commission

Yes. Our service program is designed to serve as a catalyst for our young men to grow into caring, spiritually healthy adults. The details of our program are reviewed with each enrolled student at the start of every school year.

Each student is asked to take part in six different service experiences per year of enrollment. An experience consists of an event or series of connected events meant to achieve a specific result to benefit our community and those who are marginalized. It must be organized and overseen by adults with a vested interest. A specific number of hours is intentionally not defined, as we prefer to focus on the quality of the experiences.

The service year begins June 1 and ends May 1. Service performed in that timeframe will count toward a student’s required experiences for the grade he will enter in August of that year. Incoming freshmen are welcome to complete service in the summer prior to starting school in August, just like our returning students.

We maintain a list of approved opportunities here, and we will always be willing to approve any other eligible experiences as requested by students. To be eligible, the experience must benefit a non-profit organization with a mission to serve the call to community and solidarity and/or the call to those who are poor or vulnerable. When uncertain, we use the Seven Catholic Social Justice Teachings to discern eligibility.

With our growing student body, it’s essential for students to take ownership of coordinating their own service work. We do offer a list of common service opportunities, so that students have some reliable ways to earn service. The Houston Food Bank is an excellent example of an organization that will always need help, year-round.

Optimally, service will be performed when the best opportunities for growth are available for each individual student. We hope to avoid trivializing service as a mere task. However, we understand the summer season begets many interesting opportunities, like camp counseling, mission trips, summer church programs, and more. Therefore, the timing of service is a decision we ultimately feel is the student’s own, provided it happens before the May 1 deadline yearly.

We offer a nationally-recognized award called the Presidential Volunteer Service Award; STH is one of few local Certifying Organizations qualified to evaluate and award those who achieve the required metrics, defined here. Recipients will differentiate themselves when pursuing scholarships, internships, college admissions, and much more. The annual STH award application phase is in late spring; the awards themselves – consisting of a commemorative award, an official certificate, and a signed letter from the President of the United States – are provided by St. Thomas as an exclusive benefit for our students.

Questions about this award are gladly fielded by Mrs. Looper.