Less than a month ago, Preston High School in the Bronx seemed destined for an all-too- familiar fate: another urban Catholic school being forced to close because of financial distress and shrinking enrollment.
But to students, staff members and a large network of alumni, the closing did not make sense. Preston’s finances were in order and its enrollment was near capacity. So the school’s supporters, hoping to defy a decades-long trend, waged a campaign to save it.
On Tuesday, their efforts paid off.
Less than two months after administrators announced that Preston would close at the end of this school year, they reversed course under pressure from Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, and other elected officials. The school’s two buildings will be sold to the Bally’s Foundation, a charitable arm of the casino company, which has promised to extend Preston’s lease.
After initially rejecting an offer from Bally’s to buy the property, in the Throgs Neck neighborhood, the Sisters of the Divine Compassion, the religious order that owns Preston, accepted the Bally’s offer of approximately $10 million. Bally’s has agreed to lease the buildings back to the school for 25 years at $1 a year.
“We are overjoyed that Preston will remain open for young women in the Bronx,” said Jackeline Stewart-Hawkins, a 2002 graduate who helped lead the campaign against the closing. “It’s beyond a school. It’s about the future of the Bronx, New York and even the country, because these are our future leaders.”
The agreement means that Preston will avoid the fate of other prestigious Catholic schools in the Bronx and Upper Manhattan, including Tollentine, Rice, St. Barnabas and All Hallows, which have either closed or plan to.
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