St Catherine’s statue still remains in its place at St Catherine’s School, overlooking the school’s main gate and entrance.
However, while she remains the same the school around her is upgrading and changing.
“We are excited to announce we have built a new wing at St Catherine’s, due to the growth we have seen over the past couple of years,” said Jacqui Powell, the school’s marketing assistant.
The GCN visited the school to find out more about the new wing, and the school’s exciting new chapter.
“What we discovered in the last two years is that the school has grown by about 15 per cent.
“In order to accommodate the growth in enrolment we decided we need to build a new wing,” explained head of the school Dennis Maritz.
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At the beginning of 2018, the school began to look at ways to make this dream and need a reality.
“The board, on my advice, decided we embark on the project and we were able to secure financing,” Maritz said.
But there were several checkpoints the school had to go through before work could begin.
“We had to get the Heritage Council involved as the school is older than 60 years and you cannot just change the building how you want to,” he explained.
This was an important step to ensure the character and history of the school was maintained.
“The Heritage Council came in and did a full assessment for us, telling us what we could and couldn’t do.
“They then gave us some guidelines to assist us going forward,” Maritz said.
The school tried their best to be as faithful as possible to the school’s original architecture and design and work began in August, one the school’s longest holidays, with the aim being to get the major and noisy aspects of the project completed before the children got back to school.
“We were kept busy until December 21,” said Maritz with a laugh.
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But the hard work, though not completed, has been worth it as the school was able to have the classrooms ready and waiting for the Grade Ones and Twos on the first day of school.
“This year we welcomed 66 Grade One learners, so 22 for each of our new classrooms,” Maritz said.
Though there are still tradesmen on site it is purely to finish up the final touches, which will include mounting a St Patrick’s statue, which was donated to the school, into a cove on the new wing so he can watch over the new quad.
“The quad will be known as the St Patrick’s quad while the new wing has been named after Aelredó Donovan, who was the last Dominican sister to be head of St Catherine’s,” explained Maritz.
Once this is finalised, the school hopes to start with phase two, which will see a multi-use building and staff room being built to further cater to the school’s growth.
When asked what it is about the school that had contributed to the growth, Maritz said, “We are cost-effective while still offering all the benefits of independent school learning.”
The school is excited to see what the future will hold and hopes to grow their enrolment to 800 learners in the next two years.
“Though we will never go over 800 learners, as we believe then we would be too big, and would lose the personal attention each child receives, we look forward to growing our school,” explained Maritz, who describes St Catherine’s as a hidden gem.
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