Schools become coeducational

As summer came to a close, Catholic schools throughout the archdiocese opened their doors to new and returning students with a number of significant changes. 

Three long-standing Catholic institutions made the transition to being coeducational schools.

Maryville Academy’s Jen School in Des Plaines, De La Salle Institute, and St. Laurence in Burbank each have enrolled female students for the first time. 

De La Salle Institute, founded 128 years ago by the Christian Brothers, sought to nurture poor and working class boys both morally and intellectually in its early years. It has become the alma mater of three Chicago mayors and a plethora of aldermen, county board members, state legislators and other political leaders. It also counts business leaders and media figures among its grauates.

In 2000, after hearing from the local community about the declining number of options for young women to go to Catholic high school, De La Salle’s board of directors opened a second, separate campus for young women. However, a 2012 market survey showed that single-gender education ranked low in importance on a list of reasons to attend De La Salle. 

Servite Father Paul Novak, president of De La Salle, said that in light of that research, “we looked at the resources we were utilizing to keep our students in a single-gender environment and decided that we could offer a better academic program by moving our students together and creating a coeducational curriculum.”
On Aug. 21, 420 girls began school alongside 500 boys at De La Salle’s 3434 S. Michigan Ave. campus, where all classes will be taught. The former girls’ campus at Lourdes Hall, 1040 W. 32nd Place, will be used when necessary, Novak said.

At St. Laurence High School, only 140 of the 600 students who started school in August were girls, and the majority of them were transfers from a sister school, Queen of Peace, which closed at the end of last year.

St. Laurence administrators are enthusiastic about the change which has fulfilled the school’s enrollment goal for 2020. 

Maryville’s Jen School opened in 1996 to serve boys in grades six through 12 “experiencing academic, emotional, behavioral or cognitive challenges that can potentially limit their life success,” according to its website.

This year, girls will be introduced to that program. The new female students will be accommodated in gender-specific classrooms and separated from the boys at all times except for vocational education and all-school events, according to principal Ann Craig.