New principal ready to unite 3 Catholic schools

Regional school will open on Monday

When students from St. Mary of the Assumption, St. Bonaventure and St. Ursula Catholic schools return to class Monday, many will find themselves in a new place, united under a new name — Blessed Trinity Academy — and with a new principal.

Jessica Rock will start the school year Monday with 213 students in kindergarten through eighth grade who will be coming together as one student body under a new, regionalized Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh school system.

The restructuring was undertaken to address dwindling Catholic school enrollment, which has declined by half over the past 15 years. The three North Hills schools are among the first to combine.

Kindergarten through eighthgrade students from all three schools will now fill the classrooms at the former St. Mary of the Assumption School in Indiana Township. St. Bonaventure School in Shaler is now Blessed Trinity’s preschool. St. Ursula School in Hampton, which was 106 years old, had the smallest student body and was closed under the restructuring.

“Our goal is to make all these students, who are coming together for the first time, feel like they’re part of a whole — not a child from St. Bonaventure or St. Mary’s,” Mrs. Rock said. “We have a wealth of resources, so I want to provide opportunities to meet the interests and needs of every child.”

Not only will the students be meeting new classmates and teachers in larger classes than they were used to in their former, smaller buildings, the classrooms themselves were renovated over the summer and a new multimedia room was created.

“We have a great group here,” Mrs. Rock said. “We really do. The teachers know the first year will be constantly changing and they are prepared.”

Parents, too, are excited, she said. “St. Ursula’s was very small, and many of those parents have told me, ‘It’s great that my child will have more than eight kids in their classes.’”

The average class size at the new Blessed Trinity school will be 13, Mrs. Rock said. A few classes will have 16 or more