Students at Old St. Mary’s School in Chicago pose for a group photo during the ground breaking ceremony for a new school building.

The architectural projection of the new Old St. Mary’s School in Chicago’s South Loop neighborhood.

It seems that more and more Catholic schools are closing their doors. In fact, 1,603 schools closed between 2000 and 2010, according to the National Catholic Educational Association.

Two Paulist foundations are bucking that trend and not only growing but building new school buildings. Students at Old St. Mary’s School in Chicago will walk into their new school building at the start of the 2011-12 school year, and the final phase of construction has begun at St. Mary’s Chinese Schools and Center in San Francisco.

In Chicago, construction has just begun on a three-story building to house 350 students in grades Pre-3 to eight, a sizeable increase from the current 210 students in grades Pre-3 to five. The new building’s design will match that of the current church, according to pastor Father Michael Kallock, CSP. An ongoing capitol campaign has already raised $3 million of the roughly $8 million construction project.

The school expansion is a response to a great demand for Catholic education in Chicago especially in the South Loop neighborhood Old St. Mary’s calls home, Father Kallock said. The parish boasts 1,700 registered households with a weekend Mass attendance of 1,300. An average of three new households are registered each week, he said, and the parish sees about 100 infant baptisms per year.

“No one anticipated just how much growth we would see in young families,” said Father Kallock. “The economy is slowing down, but we are still seeing growth. We have the right kind of situation here, and there are no other Catholic schools in this area of Chicago. If families decide to stay in the city and not move to the suburbs, they want to provide a good, Catholic education for their children.”

Father Daniel McCotter, CSP, interviews students at the groundbreaking of the new St. Mary’s Chinese School in San Francisco.

Chicago’s oldest Catholic elementary school serving its oldest parish, Old St. Mary’s provides students with the academic background necessary for future achievement, but offers its students an additional edge.

“Communication, cooperation, getting along with others and emotional intelligence,” Father Kallock said. “These are values that are more and more becoming measures of success.”

Father Kallock said the new school not only bolsters the future of the parish, but of the church at large as well.

“From where will the future leaders of the church come if not from our Catholic schools?” he asked.

14 years in the making
Lent 2010 began with a bang in San Francisco when construction on the new St. Mary’s Chinese Schools and Center campus began on Ash Wednesday, Feb. 17 – a date which fell on the Chinese New Year.

The new campus includes 49,500 square feet of space to include nine large classrooms that can accommodate the different learning speeds and styles of the elementary day school’s 200 students, a library and resource center, a gymnasium, commercial kitchen, and chapel – all located at the intersection of Jackson and Kearny streets in the heart of Chinatown.

Construction begins at St. Mary’s Chinese School in the heart of San Francisco’s Chinatown district.

The classrooms are also large enough to host the hundreds adult students who learn Cantonese and Mandarin at the Chinese Language School in the evenings and weekends.

Father Daniel McCotter, CSP, pastor of Holy Family Chinese Mission and Old St. Mary’s Cathedral and director of St. Mary’s Chinese Schools and Center, also hopes one of the local universities will offer MBA classes at the center, given its proximity to the city’s Financial District.

The new facilities will also include expanded room for Teahouse, a social outreach program that offers English language classes, naturalization and acculturation for Chinese immigrants and counseling for domestic abuse and gambling addiction. There is also a variety of bilingual and bicultural spiritual support programs offered at the center.

The $28 million project has been funded by grants, bequests and loans from the Archdiocese of San Francisco and donations. Some $8.5 million remains to be raised.

“This project says the Archdiocese of San Francisco and the Paulist Fathers are committed to having a presence in Chinatown,” Father McCotter said. “The Paulists came here in 1894 and the school started in 1903 because it was important to preach the Gospel to people who had not heard it.”

Father McCotter said St. Mary’s Chinese School, like all Catholic schools, will serve as a place for evangelization (as 90 percent of students are not Catholic) and re-evangelization welcoming parents back to the church.

“It says a lot about our ministry to bear witness to the Gospel to the Chinese, the majority of whom are not Catholic, and near the financial center of the city where other priorities might override Gospel values,” said Father McCotter. “Here we are smack dab in the middle of it all.”