Good Shepherd School to move to Gentilly in 2018

Good Shepherd Nativity Mission School, the CBD-based elementary school established by the late Jesuit Father Harry Tompson to provide a Catholic education to the city’s most underserved children, will relocate to a new campus in Gentilly at the start of the 2018-19 school year.

The planned two-story school, to rise on the corner of Agriculture Street and A.P. Tureaud Boulevard, will boast nearly 38,000 square feet of space to accommodate large classrooms for STEM-based instruction, a library, a dedicated art room, a cafeteria and an enclosed play yard.

Good Shepherd purchased the site, the former headquarters of Gallo Mechanical, last May. Its city block of warehouses will be demolished to make way for the new structure.

Contracts for the project were signed last month with general contractor, Ryan Gootee Construction, and Blitch Knevel Architects, which designed the brick and insulated metal panel building in a sleek modern style.

“We have a chance now to move to the Gentilly area, where 40 percent of our kids live,” said Ronald Briggs, co-chair of the ongoing $4 million capital campaign launched in anticipation of the relocation. “We’ve been at capacity for at least three years,” Briggs added. “We knew we had to get out of our current building, that the demand was greater than we could fill.”

Changing needs spur move

Although Father Tompson’s original intent was to locate his school in the CBD, where service-industry workers could drop their kids off and pick them up after work, the school’s success since its 2001 opening has led to cramped quarters for both students and staff. This school year, Good Shepherd posted the highest enrollment in its 16-year history: 105 students in grades K-7.

“When we set this school up, there was no full-time social worker; there was no full-time graduate support person. We didn’t need it at that time,” Briggs said.

The current three-story, 15,000-square-foot school, located at 353 Baronne St., contains eight modest-sized classrooms, a small suite of offices and a library. A walk-through area on the first-floor stretches the idea of “multi-purpose room” to the max, doing quadruple duty as a cafeteria, meeting space, Mass site and indoor recess area in inclement weather.

“We eat in three shifts now because we only have space for 30 kids at a time,” said Thomas Moran, Good Shepherd’s president. “The cafeteria space (in the new building) will enable us to also have gatherings there. A lot of rooms in the new building are being designed to have multiple functions.”

The school’s future cafeteria has been designed with the potential to add a full-service kitchen, should enrollment reach the 250-student minimum required by archdiocesan School Food Services for on-site food prep.

“And we will (finally) have room to spread out in the classrooms,” Moran said. “We are constricted by space here (on Baronne Street). Our classrooms are just 500 square feet; they are tiny.”

Parking, always headache-inducing in the CBD, will be no problem at the new campus, and drop-off and pick-up will be safe and efficient, with no need for students to cross a busy street or for parents to fear being ticketed.

Also, no longer will students’ outdoor play be confined to a small blacktop,” Moran said.

“Our kids will have the opportunity to run free,” Moran said, describing the future campus’ grass yard for P.E. and sports, with nearby space available to construct a gym.

Low-stress school commute