Guiding Principles

The guiding principles that direct the work of St. Joseph’s include the same principles that direct all Catholic schools, the hopes of our founder, Fr. Leo John Dehon, and our partnership with Lakota families.

We are inspired by a divine mission, which like Fr. Dehon’s is to make God’s love visible in the world. We are motivated by Fr. Dehon’s call to be prophets of love and servants of reconciliation.

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We know that we are called to Christian community where all persons are brothers and sisters and God is father of us all. This principle is strengthened by the Lakota worldview: Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ, which expresses the deep interrelatedness of all things that are.

We enrich our staff and students with encounters with Christ in prayer, scripture, the sacraments and ceremony. Students and staff are invited to participate in these liturgies as readers, blessing ministers, altar servers, music ministers and banner carriers.

We seek to form the human person holistically, as our mission statement says, educating for life – mind, body, heart and spirit. We do this through our wraparound model of care, which seeks to remove barriers and focus on strengths.

We teach a Christian understanding of the world imbued with traditional cultural values. Like Fr. Dehon work against the injustices that have affected our families.