The award is nice, but St. Patrick's Catholic Secondary School principal John Shanahan has a different measure of success.

Shanahan is one of 40 educators who will be honoured as "Canada's Outstanding Principals of 2012" by The Learning Partnership at a Feb. 28 gala dinner in Toronto's Sheraton Centre. The Learning Partnership is a charity that advocates for and supports public education. It's best known for Take Your Kids to Work day.

Shanahan is bashful, unwilling to talk about the award as a personal achievement. But he has lots to say about his school, his teachers and most of all his students.

TORONTO - The Marshall Medium student newspaper was looking for hot topics for its spring 2011 issue. So when 12th-grader Erica Lenti pitched a story about the gay-straight alliances springing up in Ontario schools, the newspaper staff was sold.

Lenti interviewed staff and students at Marshall McLuhan Catholic Secondary School in Toronto and the article passed through editing. But when Lenti picked up a copy of The Medium, she learned her story had been pulled.

Her facts were incorrect, she was told. Her take: school administrators wanted nothing to do with the topic.

TORONTO - During a trip to Bangladesh, Angela Grace Macri watched with her daughter, Mary Anne, as Bangladeshi mothers taught children the lessons they learned at the Amarok Society’s “Angela Women’s School.”

It’s a school named after Macri, the 2011 Toronto Catholic District School Board Alumni Award winner.

Macri says helping to educate girls through her volunteer work with the non-profit Amarok Society borrows lessons learned about her Catholic faith from her parents and her teachers at Toronto’s Loretto Abbey High School.

TORONTO - Toronto’s budget chief says the city will be rethinking proposed cuts that some saw as a threat to the 685 nutrition programs at the city’s public and Catholic schools.

The committee is “rethinking everything,” Councillor Mike Del Grande told The Catholic Register.

And Councillor Doug Ford, in media interviews, reassured students and parents that kids “aren’t going to go hungry.”

TORONTO - Close to 7,000 Catholic elementary students could lose their breakfast program if proposed City of Toronto budget cuts are passed, says Trustee Maria Rizzo.

Without the breakfast program, kids will be going to school hungry, she said, and would be detrimental to student learning.

“I hope (Mayor) Rob Ford can make sure they'll give them a little bit of gravy,” Rizzo told The Catholic Register.