MADISON With a helpful hand from students, Bishop Serratelli turned over a ceremonial shovelful of soil on Monday to break ground on a $2 million, two-story addition to St. Vincent Martyr School here scheduled for completion by August. It will provide six more classrooms and much-needed breathing room for an upper-grade student population that has grown fourfold in recent years since the re-establishment of the middle-school grades.
On a chilly afternoon, Jan. 4, the feast day of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, founder of the first Catholic school in the U.S., Bishop Serratelli joined Diocesan school officials, local officials and members of the St. Vincent’s parish and school communities for a groundbreaking ceremony to kick off the long-awaited construction project to build the new 5,964-square-foot building. All of St. Vincent’s 458 students wore yellow hard hats, while several of them also participated in the event, which included the Bishop’s blessing of the ground at the construction site, located at the rear of the existing school building and between the school and the parish center.
“The right moment is now. We need to incorporate the middle school culture into St. Vincent Martyr School, so that the students can spread out a bit. The new addition will allow for a better learning environment, enhance the overall school and benefit the entire school population,” said Msgr. George Hundt, St. Vincent’s pastor, who participated in the groundbreaking ceremony and also turned over a small portion of soil outside, using a ceremonial silver shovel. The pastor called the well-attended event — which included the reading of prayers and Scripture passages — “a wonderful experience.”
Designed to match the height of the exciting school building, the addition will house three classrooms and also bathrooms on each of its two levels, as well as a state-of-the-art science room, ready for STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering and Math] instruction. Plans — which began to take shape more than a year ago — also call for the refurbishment of the kitchen in the school and implementation of small but important details, such as painting the interior of the building with colors that are conductive to learning like yellows, greens and blues, said Barbara Doyle, St. Vincent’s principal from 2007-09, who has led the fund-raising campaign and the school’s Task Force.
So far, St. Vincent’s has raised $1.85 million of the $2 million needed for the project from donors from the parish and school communities, its Home School Association (HSA) and diocesan School Office. This impressive total thus far stands as a testament to the generosity of the parish community, which also has been contributing to “Building the Future — The Future Starts Now,” an ongoing campaign to fund an extensive upcoming church renovation project, Msgr. Hundt said.
“It’s wonderful that we are expanding,” said Sister of Charity Noreen Holly, principal, who noted that St. Vincent’s students hail from other municipalities, including East Hanover, Chatham, Florham Park, Morristown and Summit. “St. Vincent’s helps parents with their challenge to raise their children in the Catholic faith.”
Other dignitaries, who overturned a shovelful of soil at the ceremony were: Sister Noreen; Sister Rosemary Moynihan, general superior of the Sisters of Charity, who have staffed the school since it opened; Doyle, Kieran Flanagan, Tom Dwyer and Ernie Turner, representing the school’s Task Force; diocesan School Superintendent Mary Baier and Associate Superintendent Debbie Duane; architects Nancy Dougherty and Theodora Boyadjis of Studio 1200, the building’s designers; a representative of the project’s landscape architect; Michele Baggett and Heather Powers of the HSA. Dougherty is a former school parent, Doyle said.“Today, just about half of our schools from the 1960s remain open. Finances are a challenge. But the crisis facing our Catholic schools is deeper. Religion has been driven from the public forum and tragically, it has lost much influence even in private life. Even among the faithful, Catholic truths, values and observances are watered down or diminished in our secular culture,” Bishop Serratelli said during the ceremony. “In this context, your investment as a parish in maintaining a school is a sign of hope. Today’s groundbreaking for this new addition is a bold act of courage on your part against the tide of our modern secularist Zeitgeist,” he said.
The expansion of St. Vincent’s that now necessitates the new addition started in 2009, when the school reopened the sixth grade, followed by the re-establishment of its seventh and eighth grades in 2010. For that, the school hired new teachers, who put in place interdisciplinary approaches and state-of-the-art technology, all designed to challenge today’s students, and bought laptops to open new possibilities for learning. St. Vincent’s made room on its lower level for seventh-grade homeroom, an eighth-grade homeroom, an art and music room and a science lab. Originally, the school closed the middle-school grades in the early 1990s, because of declining enrolment. Doyle remembers parents approaching her back in the late 2000s, asking to re-establish the middle school.
“Expansion turned out to be a big challenge that made the middle school four times larger,” said Sister Noreen, who added that St. Vincent now educates 40 students in eighth grade, 35 in seventh grade and 46 in sixth grade. “The middle-school students have some of their classes in the meeting rooms in the parish center, making it difficult for them to get back to their other classes in the school,” she said.
The revitalized St. Vincent Martyr School goes hand in hand with “Envision: Planning Our Parish Future,” a process that has enabled the faithful to help chart a new vision — a new future — for the parish and implement an ambitious plan to inspire this already vibrant faith community to expand further its reach in spreading the “Good News” of the Gospel.
“‘Envision’ has allowed us to look at the entire parish an school — what’s good and where we still need to grow. It also gives everyone accountability,” Msgr. Hundt told The Beacon in 2011. He had initiated Envision several months after Bishop Serratelli appointed him pastor in January 2009.
Msgr. Hundt credited Sister Noreen and St. Vincent’s staff and faculty for staffing a school that consistently delivers a “value-based education.”
“St. Vincent Martyr School is thriving,” Msgr. Hundt said. “We have a school population that believes in the value of Catholic education — and that brings forth success,” Msgr. Hundt said.