Kairos

In the 2024-2025 school year, we are offering 5 Kairos retreats to accommodate as many schedules & students as possible. The first Kairos will take place in the Summer, followed by two in the Fall Semester & two in the Spring Semester. Each 4-day, 3-night retreat will take place at Whispering Winds Catholic Conference Center in beautiful Julian, CA. Students pack a sleeping & personal items, while the rest is taken care of by our team!

The cost to attend Kairos is $350 for ASB Card Members & $450 for Non-ASB Card Members and is all inclusive. We never want cost to be an obstacle for a student looking to grow their faith through a retreat. If you have questions of concerns about the cost, please do not hesitate to reach out to Tori Cutcher at cutchert@smhs.org to discuss further & come up with a plan that allows your student to attend.

In order to register for Kairos, please complete the online registration below. These retreats fill up fast, so don't wait! We take the first 50 students before beginning a waitlist.

We release this form retreat by retreat, which means that only the NEXT CLOSEST retreat is open for sign ups. The retreat dates, as well as the opening & closing registration date, can be found above. Please note that the retreats may sell out before the closing registration date if we reach our limit of 50 students prior to that date.

After registering, you will receive an email within 48 hours from Tori Cutcher confirming your registration & sending you the necessary permission forms & parent meeting info. This information will be sent to the parent email inputted on the registration form. Please ensure that you are putting a parent email down that is checked often to ensure that you are up to date on everything you need to know about Kairos.

If you have any questions or are having trouble accessing the online registration, please contact Tori Cutcher at cutchert@smhs.org.

The SMCHS Retreat Team is committed to making Kairos accessible to all Seniors, regardless of any financial situation. In order to support that vision, we have the following options in place :

1.    Delaying the retreat payment due date to a time in the school year that works better for a family’s budget.

2.    Payment plans that can spread across any time period that works best for a family. You tell us when payments should begin & we will work with the Business Office to set that up in your FACTS account.

3.    A Partial Scholarship that can also be paired with a delayed retreat payment due date or payment plan.

4.    Full Scholarship.

If one of these options would allow your student to attend Kairos, please reach out to Tori Cutcher at cutchert@smhs.org to discuss further

We are happy to offer refunds up until 9:00 AM the morning that we depart on a Kairos retreat. In order to move forward with a refund, an email from a parent must be sent to Tori Cutcher at cutchert@smhs.org. We are not able to process refunds requested by Seniors without a parent email.

We are also able to move a payment to a later Kairos date. This is a great option for a Senior who is no longer able to attend their original Kairos choice, but is still interested in attending the retreat.

Please email Tori Cutcher at cutchert@smhs.org to inquire about if spots are still available for the Kairos you would like to attend. We are only able to take late adds up to 3 weeks prior to the departure date. If there are spots open & if the request is made within the above time frame, we are happy to accommodate!

If the retreat is full, you will be placed on a waitlist & notified if an opening becomes available.

If the request is made after the late add deadline, you will be encouraged to sign up for the next closest Kairos.

We only allow Seniors to attend Kairos once as a retreatant. Each of the 5 Kairos retreats is exactly the same, so you would essentially be paying twice to attend something you already experienced. We also want to ensure as many Seniors as possible are able to make a Kairos, so our registration spots are reserved for those that have not yet attended.

With that being said, Kairos is an impactful experience & we understand the desire to go again! If you feel called to be a part of other people’s Kairos, please apply to be a Kairos student leader!

No! Kairos is designed in such a way that anyone from any faith background can get something out of the retreat. As a Catholic school committed to our Catholic identity, the retreat does have Catholic components such as Mass, Adoration & Confession. However, those practices are not exclusive for just Catholics to participate in. From Seniors who have grown up in a Catholic family their whole life to those who practice no faith at all, you will be hard pressed to find someone who gained nothing from going on Kairos.

Because we offer a variety of retreat dates for Kairos to accommodate as many schedules as possible, we do not allow students to come up late or leave early. Each piece of Kairos, from the moment we arrive to the moment we leave, is intentional & builds on what comes next. In order to give each Senior the opportunity to get the most out of their Kairos experience, we need them fully present the whole time.

The only exceptions to this would be an emergency of some kind or if there is a very specific extenuating circumstance, that would prevent a student from attending any other Kairos retreat, besides the one they would need to leave early from or come late to. The specific extenuating circumstance needs to be communicated to & approved by Tori Cutcher. If you have questions about this, please email cutchert@smhs.org.

Yes! Whispering Winds Catholic Conference Center does accommodate dietary restrictions. Dietary needs of any kind can be specified within the Kairos registration.

If you would feel more comfortable bringing your own food, we are also more than happy to accommodate that!

Absolutely! Our school does have a medication policy in place that allows students to bring any medication that they may need while on school trips, however it will be held & administered by Tori Cutcher. This policy is in place for all Diocesan schools & is meant to ensure that all medication is kept safe & only administered to the student to which it is prescribed.

More detailed information regarding this policy & how we administer medication on retreats, will be discussed at the Kairos Parent Info Sessions for each Kairos retreat. If you have questions about this, please reach out to Tori Cutcher at cutchert@smhs.org.

Each Senior who attends Kairos is sent a questionnaire that includes a space for them to request who they would like to room with.

These are REQUESTS, meaning it is not a guarantee that they will be roomed with those they list. We of course want those going on Kairos to fill comfortable with their roommates, but we also want to refrain from placing students together who have a history of making poor decisions when they are with each other.

For the most part we are able to accommodate the requests we receive, but it is important to remember that a request is not the same thing as a guarantee.

Students find out who they will be rooming with when they arrive at the retreat center.

We do not, under any circumstance, allow retreatants or parents to pick who is in a Kairos small group. Each Kairos Team spends a great deal of time creating small groups that are intentional & will allow retreatants the opportunity to open up as much as they desire. We take the creation of Kairos small groups very seriously & make decisions that are rooted in prayer & what is best for each retreatant.

The only outside information we will accept from retreatants or parents is if certain retreatants should NOT be paired together. If there is a dynamic between two retreatants that you would like to make us aware of, please reach out to Tori Cutcher at cutchert@smhs.org.

You do not! We take of that part for you by sending a list of all retreatants to our attendance office. The days of the retreat will be marked as “Excused” in Aeries & do not need to be confirmed by a parent.

All SMCHS Retreats are considered Excused Absences. This means that students will not be penalized in any way for stepping away from campus to attend a retreat. Students are given ample time to make up any work or assessments that are missed while on retreat. Our Retreat Team works closely with faculty, coaches & counselors to ensure that students are preparing ahead of time for what they will be missing, & are not completely overwhelmed with makeup work upon their return to campus.

Seniors are encouraged to look at their class, sport & extracurricular schedules when picking which Kairos they would like to attend. For help in discerning which Kairos retreat would work best for your schedule, please reach out to Tori Cutcher at cutchert@smhs.org.

To learn more about our school wide absence & make up work policy, please consult the SMCHS Parent Student Handbook.

This may be one of the few times a student hears this, but you are not allowed to work on school work during Kairos! Kairos is meant to give Seniors a break from the busyness of their lives. Their only job on Kairos is to be present & to focus on growing their relationships with the Lord, each other & themselves. There is a time & place for school work, but it is not on Kairos.

Years of Kairos Retreats, where cell phones were allowed, proved one thing very clearly: Seniors cannot enter into the Kairos experience in a meaningful & complete way, if cell phones are also present. It is impossible to fully “retreat” from the hustle & bustle of campus, if students have a device in their pocket that brings them right back to all of it with the click of a button. 

In order to protect the Kairos experience & give retreatants the best chance at being present to all the Lord wants to do for them on this retreat, we collect cell phones as students are getting off the bus on the first day of the retreat. Cell phones are returned as students are loading the bus to come home on the last day of the retreat.

Cell phones are collected as students are exiting the busses at the retreat center. This means that, in the event of an emergency, we are able to give cell phones back because they are up at the retreat site with us. If you have questions about the cell phone policy on Kairos, please reach out to Tori Cutcher at cutchert@smhs.org.