Students will trade ordinary days for music, service projects and special traditions during National Lutheran Schools Week, which, for most local schools, is the last week in January.
St. John Lutheran School (Seward) Principal Barb Mertens said celebrating NLSW is a great way to acknowledge Lutheran schools across the nation.
Mertens said the 2026 NLSW theme for St. John is “Make a joyful noise,” based on Psalm 98:4. A committee of teachers plans the school’s NLSW activities, which include special dress days, games and a service project.
For this year’s service project, students will assemble solar lights and water filters for people in need outside of the U.S., Mertens said.
“It’s good to teach our students about community service, whether that’s something that we do locally or something that we do nationally or globally,” Mertens said. “It’s teaching them to be a part of something that’s bigger than ourselves and that we can be in service to other people.”
Similarly, Our Redeemer Lutheran School (Staplehurst) Principal Harlan Anson said some of his students’ favorite aspect of their NLSW is playing games with residents at Kinship Pointe.
“Our theme verse this school year is Mark 16:15, and it says, ‘Go into all the world and preach the good news to everyone,’ and sometimes doing that may not be with our words, but it might be with our actions,’” Anson said. “When we get to go out and be a part of the community and do things with them and show the love of Jesus to them, that’s what it’s all about, and that’s what we should be all about too.”
Our Redeemer students also enjoy fun activities, dress-up days, games and more.
Trinity Academy at Concordia University encourages its students to dress in the colors of the liturgical calendar during the last week of January and instructs students on the meaning and significance of traditional church-year colors. The school will also sing a seasonal hymn to go with each day’s color.
“The focused casual dress days help create a festival atmosphere and build the community,” Jane Haley of Trinity Academy said. “The different colors are a visual way to reflect on God’s story that we live in, and we will find opportunities during the week to discuss the symbolism of these colors for the church year.”
St. Paul Lutheran School (Utica) Principal Sam Sommerer said National Lutheran Schools Week used to be in early March for all schools, and, to avoid conflicts with Lent, it is now commonly celebrated in late January. However, St. Paul, which will celebrate its 125th anniversary this year, has kept its celebration during the first week in March.
“Utica, if not known for anything, it’s known for tradition,” Sommerer said. “We like to stay in our tradition, and, honestly, January is full of basketball, so having all of those teams going all over the place and everything else actually makes it a little bit easier for us to do that time.”
However, St. Paul will still participate in Concordia University’s Lutheran School Week celebration. Several local Lutheran school choirs will sing at the University that week.
“The students work pretty hard on their songs, and they have a good selection and catchy tune, and most of them love to sing,” Sommerer said. “The other thing is, these are Jesus songs, and that’s what we’re all about.”
The St. Paul students’ March celebration will feature dress-up days, songs, special events and a school fun day complete with games, prizes, a bounce house and more.
“We try to make it still a week of school, but add in things that really, really stress the ‘why’ we’re a school – the family, the community and the camaraderie,” Sommerer said. “And, we try to do stuff that, when the kids are 35 and 40 years old, they say, ‘Oh, I remember when we did this!’”
Anson said students enjoy the opportunity to do exciting things that they normally would not get to do in school during NLSW, and all of the week’s good times are because of God.
“We get to do fun stuff, like rock-paper-scissors and dressing silly and things like that, but, ultimately, we want to remember why we are where we are and who we get to tell people about,” Anson said.
