Bid to Get Catholic School Renewed

Efforts to build the only Catholic high school in North County are being renewed as area churches and parochial schools this week distribute a survey to determine the interest among parents and students.

“The diocese has played with the idea of a high school in North County for a long time,” said Msgr. Ray Moore of St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Carlsbad. “About 400 youngsters go from the North County to the Catholic high schools in San Diego, so there is an obvious need.”

Moore, who is spearheading the study, said that “it just comes down to putting it all together and nailing it down to see if it is a practical venture.”

Audrey Tellers, superintendent of schools for the Catholic Diocese in San Diego, downplayed the possibility of a new school.

She emphasized that the plans are “for years from now” and that, although the diocese is open to the results of the feasibility study, the church has many other needs to address.

Tellers acknowledged the need for a high school for Catholics in North County but said the costs of buying land and constructing the facility are high. She said she could not see herself “advising us to go into debt on this issue.”

Parents and pastors in North County would have to show “not only that they could afford (a new high school) but that there is a strong basis on which it could be built and supported for many years to come by the people in the area,” she said.

However, Moore said he is “very optimistic” that a new high school is feasible and that, although past attempts have failed, things have changed.

For nearly a decade, the diocese has pursued the idea of a high school in North County and at one point had plans to build a small high school in Rancho Santa Fe and a larger one in La Costa, neither of which ever materialized.

The difference this time, said one North County pastor, lies in Bishop Robert Brom, who has expressed greater interest in establishing a high school in North County than did his predecessor.

“In the end, it’s a matter of will,” said Msgr. Dennis Clark, pastor of the Nativity Catholic Church in Rancho Santa Fe. “If you decide that it’s something that’s truly important, then you find the resources and you make it happen.”

He said there was little interest in a high school before.

“In the past, at the top level, the will just wasn’t there,” Clark said. “Obviously, our new bishop is very open to taking another look at this.”

Clark, who had been superintendent of schools for the diocese from 1978 to 1986, had hoped to build a high school in North County during that tenure. But the plans were also spoiled by opposition of neighbors who feared the school would increase traffic and noise.

A Catholic high school in North County, St. Thomas Aquinas School in San Marcos, closed nearly a decade ago because of financial problems after only two years of operation. Parents and community members in North County opened the school by themselves after their request for help from the diocese was turned down, Clark said.

He said that early experiment proves “the willingness of people in that area to put their own dollars into a school to make it work. They were really good people, and we let them down.”