Construction includes upgrades for Trinity High
A sparkling new St. Joseph Junior High School opens this fall in Manchester, providing a $26 million exclamation point for parents considering a Catholic education for their kids, Catholic school officials hope.
Clergy and school officials broke ground for the 45,000-square-foot, four-story building in March 2023, and the seventh/eighth grade school is scheduled to open this September.
It is adjacent to Trinity High School, the largest Catholic high school in Manchester, which is getting upgrades of its own as part of the project.
School officials say the new building is drawing lots of interest from parents of potential students.
Anticipated enrollment at St. Joseph for this fall is 130 students, a 23% increase over this school year, according to Nathan Stanton, the president of Trinity/St. Joseph schools. And officials expect a 7% increase in enrollment at Trinity.
“The excitement is out there,” Stanton said inside the half-completed foyer to the school.
They also cite other factors that are helping to boost enrollment: state-funded Education Freedom Account vouchers, residual misgivings over COVID school closures and public school debates over cultural issues, the most recent being gender identity.
“There’s a lot of distractions in a public school that we don’t have here,” said Denise Brewitt, director of institutional advancement for the schools.
The construction represents a drastic change for St. Joseph Regional Junior High School, which is dropping the word “regional” from its name with the move.
For the last decade, St. Joseph had shared a building with a Catholic elementary school in east Manchester. The new St. Joseph will have large classrooms, science labs, a media lab, a benefactor-funded academic center and a robotics center it will share with Trinity.
For its part, Trinity gets some upgrades: an entrance foyer, a courtyard with a grotto and amphitheater, a new gym floor, a fitness center, a first-ever elevator, reconfigured cafeteria and locker rooms, and new flooring and ceilings in all classrooms.
St. Joseph suffered steep enrollment declines in the 2010s after it closed its standalone school on Pine Street in downtown Manchester. But it has slowly climbed back to 106 this year.
Likewise, the Trinity population dropped 30% from 2015 to 2019 but climbed up to 327 this year.
Yet, the combined enrollment of approximately 430 falls short of the schools’ goal of 120 students per grade, or 720 between the two schools.
The projects come as the number of New Hampshire students decline and even public schools become eager to attract, and keep, students.
“What Trinity has done, we’re doing that multiplied by four,” said Jim O’Connell, the vice chairman of the Manchester school board. All four of Manchester middle schools will add modular spaces over the summer, he said.
Also, Manchester will be building a new $72 million elementary school. All totaled, the Manchester School District will spend $306 million in phase I upgrades, he said.
The front of Trinity High School in Manchester
Denise Brewitt, director of institutional advancement, Trinity High School and St. Joseph Junior High School, and Nathan Stanton, president of Trinity High School and St. Joseph Junior High School, stand in the new entrance to the Manchester school as they talk about the expansion project.
David Thibault, superintendent of Catholic Schools for the Diocese of Manchester, explains the expansion project at Trinity High School in Manchester, where a new St. Joseph Junior High School is under construction.
O’Connell, a Democrat who is running for Executive Council, said he has no problem with the St. Joseph/Trinity expansion.
His children attended Catholic elementary schools.
But he objects to the use of state-funded vouchers to pay for tuition.
“Ultimately, I think it’s unconstitutional. It flies in the face of separation of church and state,” O’Connell said.
In 2023, a trial court judge rejected a constitutional challenge to education vouchers, and the losing side never appealed the ruling.
Education Freedom Account vouchers provide financial assistance to families reporting up to 350% of the federal poverty level, which this year amounts to $109,200 for a family of four.
About one-third of families at Trinity and St. Joseph receive EFA assistance, and the average EFA grant is about $3,500, Brewitt said. The Children’s Scholarship Fund and the schools themselves provide further assistance.
“It’s opened more doors for families who thought they couldn’t consider this option,” Stanton said. The annual tuition for St. Joseph is $9,300; $14,400 for Trinity.
About 40% of students come from families that aren’t Catholic. Half come from a public school background, Brewitt said.
Nearly 30% of Trinity students are minority, as are about a quarter of St. Joseph students. Minority numbers have never been as high as they are now, Brewitt said.
Brewitt said the school would not discriminate against LGBTQ+ students. The student would have to apply; the application concentrates on the potential for a partnership between the school and the family.
Trinity/St. Joseph have enrolled LGBTQ+ students, some whose parents have turned to the school because of bullying in other schools, Brewitt said.
In a transgender situation, a student would be recognized by the gender that “God gave them,” said David Thibault, superintendent of Catholic schools in New Hampshire. Pronouns, bathroom use and sports teams would follow.
“As a Catholic institution, we teach the whole person. Our primary function is the formation of kids,” Thibault said.
Catholic schools attribute some of the jumps in enrollment to the way they handled the COVID-19 shutdown.
Catholic schools arm their students with Chromebooks at the beginning of every year, so Catholic schools needed only a long weekend to go remote after schools shut down in March 2020.
And the following September, Catholic schools reopened, compared to most public schools, which remained in remote status for months.
“Parents were tired of their kids being out of school,” Brewitt said. “And remote learning was a window into the quality of their kids’ education. Parents were responding to that.”
The projects come as the number of NH students decline and public schools become eager to attract and keep students.
St. Joseph/Trinity expansion in numbers
$20 million
The price tag for construction of a new junior high school and upgrades to the adjacent Trinity High School exceeded the ability of the Diocese of Manchester to use its reserve funds to finance the project, so the diocese turned to Wall Street to raise $20 million.
“This is the first time the diocese had ever done external financing for any project,” said Steve McMani, director of operations for the diocese. “For all intents and purposes, it is a loan.”
30 years
The diocese ended up with a 30-year, single-issue, tax-exempt bond, after working out details with a Denver-based municipal advisor, bond counsel and the New Hampshire Health and Education Facilities Authority. The deal needed an OK from the governor and Executive Council, which came in August.
4.499%
The deal closed Jan. 12, 2024, and the final rate (about 4.5%) is far less than the going commercial rate at the time, which was about 5.7%, said Tim Wade, New Hampshire regional president at M&T Bank, which bought the bond. “All we’re doing is passing on (to Trinity) the tax break we get because it’s tax exempt,” Wade said. He added that the project is good for the community, and it helps the bank reach goals under the Community Reinvestment Act.
24 months
The bond has some other details. Trinity pays interest only for the first 24 months, then a principal-and-interest amortization schedule kicks in. In year 10, the debt must be refinanced, when rates could be either lower or higher.
$5 million
The bond didn’t cover the entire cost of the $26 million project. The diocese provided a loan of $1 million, and before ground even broke, Trinity and St. Joseph launched a $5 million capital campaign. It has raised a little more than $1 million so far, said Nathan Stanton, the president of the two schools.
Mark Hayward
