By Amy Zimmer
DNAinfo News Editor
UPPER EAST SIDE — A long-shuttered parochial school on East 97th Street will reopen in September with new classrooms for a prestigious private school.
The St. Francis de Sales Academy, run by the Sisters of the Holy Union at 116 E. 97th St., was closed in 2007, one of many Catholic schools that the Archdiocese of New York shut in Manhattan over the last several years.
The school's building is now being transformed into gymnasium, science labs and arts classrooms for the Marymount School, an independent Catholic school for girls where tuition costs $35,000 a year.
Marymount — whose main building is at East 84th Street and Fifth Avenue and has its middle school three blocks south of that — began using the vacant St. Francis building for its gym classes last year.
Now the elite girls' schools is renovating the 42,000-square-foot building with state-of-the-art laboratories for its science, technology, engineering and math program that are slated to open in September, the school's headmistress Concepcion Alvar said.
"This will obviously help us expand the footprint of our school," Alvar said. "It will allow us to double up on our athletic facilities. It will also house our music and art, speech and drama groups."
Alvar did immediately know the price tag, but said, "It's not a cheap renovation."
She beamed about the technology uses the building will have, explaining that Marymount has been on the "cutting edge" of adopting new gadgets, like iPads, which students got in September and are being used for science, math and art.
Her school has been recognized for being on the forefront of technology and will be featured on the Discovery Channel on June 1 as one of four schools — the only one in New York and the only all girls' — on a series called "Preparing Students for the 21st century," Alvar noted.
"We've put all the bells and whistles in," Alvar said. "Nobody had been using the building for three years. We're giving it a whole new life in more ways than one. It has brought back the voices of little children to its halls. It will enhance that area. When a school closes, it loses its life."
Maria Gonzales, a 94-year-old who has lived on East 97th Street across from St. Francis for 30 years, was looking forward to the return of students, but still lamented the loss of St. Francis.
"It's good that something is opening," she said in Spanish. "[The school] is supposed to be for everyone. All colors. That's what St. Francis was," she recalled.
The block has seen a lot of construction, renovation and a wave of higher-income families in recent years. "Everything has changed on the block," Gonzales said. "A lot of new people."
