St. Patrick School on Thursday unveiled plans to open a new, state-of-the-art Catholic school facility at the beginning of the 2017-18 academic year.
Plans call for closing the current facility on Austin Street and building the new school on Campus Drive in the Community Campus off Lafayette Road.
The school, to be renamed St. Patrick Academy, would no longer be a parochial school, but would become an independent Catholic school with a lay board of directors from the Hope for Tomorrow Foundation. The foundation, led mostly by the local community and business leaders, will assume full fiduciary responsibility for the school.
The foundation was founded by Jim Broom, CEO of Direct Capital in Portsmouth. His children attend the pre-K to Grade 8 school.
“I’ve been a volunteer there for the past 12 years. It’s something near and dear to me,” he said of the school. “There are a lot of special attributes of what St. Pat’s does for me, my family and the surrounding community.”
St. Patrick’s current building is a main roadblock, said Broom and Father Gary Belliveau, pastor of Corpus Christi Parish, which encompasses three churches in Portsmouth as well as the school.
Over the past year, the parish has been going through a review process called Moving from Maintenance to Mission to look at the various facilities the church owns to understand their status and what kind of work would need to be done to make them help with their mission.
“Some of the buildings are old and inadequate for what we need. The oldest one of them all is the school,” Belliveau said.
He said the school had an engineering study conducted to examine possibilities for the Austin Street building, but its limited space made any option a challenge. It also lacks a playground and gymnasium.
“It lacks so many facilities,” Belliveau said of the building. “It would be worthless to throw money at the building that would still be inadequate in the end.”
Belliveau said there is a renewed interest in the school, which had seen its enrollment diminish over the years. Currently, 130 students attend the school. In 1915, according to the church’s website, the school boasted an enrollment of 500. The open house the school held this year “had more people than ever,” Belliveau said.
