2025-2026
Villa Maria Parent Speaker Series
Villa Maria parents are invited to attend these complimentary sessions on campus, each designed to help build awareness on timely and important topics and facilitate conversations with your teens.
All sessions will be held on Villa Maria's campus. Registration links below!
Adapting and Navigating Challenges with Resilience and Determination
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SPEAKER: JENNIFER DAVIS
Wednesday, October 15, 2025
7:30 to 8:30 p.m.
Jennifer Pharr Davis is an internationally recognized speaker, author of Becoming Odyssa, and award-winning entrepreneur. She has covered more than 14,000 miles of trails across six continents. In 2011, Jennifer set the overall fastest known time on the Appalachian Trail, completing the 2,185-mile path in just 46 days—an average of 47 miles per day. Since then, she has continued to push boundaries, backpacking 700 miles while pregnant, walking 1,100 miles across North Carolina with her newborn son, and hiking in all 50 states with her two-year-old daughter. Jennifer has been named a National Geographic Adventurer of the Year, received the Governor of North Carolina’s Laurel Wreath Award, and has served on the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness & Nutrition.
Note: Villa's freshman and sophomore classes will attend this session in school on Thursday, October 16th.
Mentoring, Teaching, and Learning
SPEAKER: DR. WILLIAM CARR
Monday, March 16, 2025
7:00 to 8:00 p.m.
Understanding the impact of mentors and teachers can be critical to both the learning process and for future success in any profession. Students believe teachers make assessments, create evaluations, and reach summations on how students perform against established academic benchmarks. In today's technology- driven teaching and learning paradigm, mentors who lead by process, facilitation, and modeling become more critical to the learning process and for students' excellence. Certainly, the arts and sports/ athletics share these commonalities with student development.
The IHM Sisters have been models of teaching excellence in both the United States and abroad. Because of Dr. William Carr's 40 years of association and collaboration of teaching, service, and learning in the IHM tradition, this lecture/ piano recital will explore how the discipline, drive, and dedication of early IHM teaching led to my academic successes at Immaculata University, the Juilliard School, solo piano performances at Carnegie Hall in New York City, the graduate school of business at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and to creating performance/ presentations to over 30 Fortune 500 corporations both in the United State and Europe.
A question-and-answer engagement will conclude this presentation.
Note: Villa students will attend this session in school on March 17th.
Past Event
QPR Training
SPEAKER: CHESTER COUNTY INTERMEDIATE UNIT
Monday, September 29, 2025
7:00 to 9:00 p.m.
Learn how to recognize the warning signs of a suicide crisis and how to question, persuade, and refer someone to help. All Villa students will have been trained in QPR during the school year. Please consider attending this training so that you can your daughter(s) can have meaningful ongoing conversations about such an important topic.
Note: Villa's freshman and sophomore classes will attend this session in school on Wednesday, October 1st.