As we look ahead to the 2024-2025 school year, we would like to remind all parents of the required background screening and training for all who volunteer at St. Mary's School. Per mandate by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, anyone who volunteers in a Catholic school in any capacity (lunch assistants, field trips, classroom readers, etc.) must complete the following two requirements:

1) Complete a CORI background check annually
2) Participate in child safety training (to be completed only once - see below for more info)

The child safety training program approved by the archdiocese is Protecting God's Children (Virtus Online). This training must be completed in person. Please go to www.virtusonline.org and click on "First Time Registrant" and select "Boston Archdiocese." When training is completed, please send a copy of the certificate to [email protected] and keep a copy for your records.

For those who would like to volunteer and have not completed the Virtus training, please note on the academic calendar that training sessions have been scheduled at St. Mary's for Wednesday, August 14 and Wednesday, September 25. These sessions have not been added to the list of available sessions on the Virtus website, but we expect they will be added within the next 2 weeks.


* Please be aware that anyone who wishes to volunteer in any capacity must complete the CORI background check annually and must have completed the Virtus training (to be completed only once, not annually). Completion of these two items requires advance planning as it can take up to 3 weeks or more for CORI forms to be cleared through the Archdiocese and pre-registration is required for the Virtus training. For the 2024-2025 school year, we will accept CORI submissions and new Virtus certificates on a rolling basis for the first half of the school year. Please note that we have set Friday, February 14, 2025 as the last date to submit any CORI forms or new Virtus certificates for the 2024-2025 school year. So if, for example, you would like to volunteer for Field Day or any end of year field trips/activities, Friday, February 14 will be the last day to fulfill these two screening requirements.