Construction and expansion project cost $26 million

Teachers, students, faculty and parents celebrate the ribbon-cutting of St. Joseph Jr. High School in Manchester on Aug. 29. (Photo by Mike Cote, NHBR)

About 350 students at Trinity High School returned to their Manchester campus this week to some upgrades at their school and a brand-new building that is now the home of St. Joseph Jr. High School.

This year, 125 seventh and eighth graders are attending the $26 million, 45,000-square-foot school, which is now connected to the Trinity High building. The junior high school had been housed on Belmont Street with an elementary school for the past 14 years.

“It opens up a tremendous amount of opportunity for all of our students and the faculty,” said Nathan Stanton, president of Trinity High School and St. Joseph Jr. High School.

Trinity High offers a college preparatory program but has been expanding its curriculum, Stanton said after a ribbon-cutting ceremony Thursday at the Bridge Street and Mammoth Road campus.

“We’ve added a lot more electives.

We’ve partnered up with Manchester Community College, and we’ve been do ing a lot more trade stuff, too,” said Stanton, noting that the school’s emphasis on faith will always be at the forefront.

Trinity High School serves more than 40 New Hampshire municipalities. Interest in Catholic schools has been augmented in part by public school closures during the pandemic.

“It’s an important step that Catholic education is taking in the diocese,” said Rev. Roarke “Rory” Traynor, Trinity High’s chaplain. “For so many years, it’s been a difficult run. People were looking for something. Did we have the wherewithal to provide it?

“But what we found was when COVID came and people didn’t quite know what to do, we were able to muster all our forces onto the superintendent (Dave Thibeault) — he took care of it — and we began to move,” Traynor said.

Matt McSorley, who joined St. Joseph Jr. High a year ago, serves as the school’s counselor and also has taught English.

“We take a big interest not only in their academic development but in their emotional development, their spiritual development and their personal development,” McSorley said.