By Anna Weaver | Hawaii Catholic Herald

It’s been 45 years since a Catholic high school — Damien Memorial in Kalihi — has been built on Oahu.

With existing Catholic high schools bunched in Honolulu, while the Leeward Oahu population booms, it isn’t surprising that many believe a new high school should be built out there.

In fact, the idea has been seriously bounced around for at least 20 years.

It’s being bounced around again.

A long-term, 3- to 10-year goal for the Diocese of Honolulu, according to director of planning Tom Papandrew, is a Catholic high school in west Oahu.

An ideal new high school, he said, would be on at least 50 acres of land and cost between $75-100 million to buy the land, develop the site, and build the facilities. (By way of comparison, Hawaii Business magazine in 2005 listed the assessed value of all diocesan buildings in Hawaii as worth $97 million.)

“It’s probably a bigger project than has ever been undertaken here by the church,” Papandrew said.

In the short term, Papandrew said, the diocese would like to “make sure that we pay attention to the existing schools so that they all operate at their optimum size and that the quality of the facilities is maintained.”

A Leeward Oahu Catholic high school is far from a new idea.

In the late 1980s, as plans developed to make Kapolei a “second city” to Honolulu, Damien and St.FrancisSchool considered collaborating on a leeward high school, according to former Damien principal Christian Brother Karl Walczak.

It was potentially to be in the Ewa plains area “either as two separate schools or possibly as a co-ed joint venture,” he said.

In the end, both schools found it would be too costly. Brother Walczak said that Damien decided to concentrate on a $2 million capital campaign to remodel its science labs.

In 1992, a report by mainland Catholic educational consultant John Convey recommended that the diocese and leeward parishes “immediately commit to specific plans for a high school in the Kapolei area.” Suggestions included “a second campus of MaryknollHigh School, the relocation of an existing high school or schools, or a new diocesan school.”

The Sisters of St. Francis, who run St.FrancisSchool in Manoa, continued to consider building a Leeward school all the way up to 2005. According to St.FrancisSchool principal Sister Joan of Arc Souza, the Manoa campus would have been sold and St. Francis moved to Kapolei. But after a five-year strategic planning process, the school and the sisters decided it wasn’t financially feasible.

“That’s why we decided to open up an elementary school, go co-ed, and put down deeper roots right here in Manoa,” Sister Joan of Arc said.

Another school with plans to expand was St. JosephSchool in Waipahu. In 2004, it announced tentative plans for a $10.7 million expansion of the church and school.

St. Joseph ’s pastor La Salette Father Joven Junio said, “We were asking our community way back then to dream with us as to what they envisioned St. Joseph being in 10 years time.” A high school was one of those dreams.

While St. JosephChurch was remodeled and expanded, the high school plans did not come to fruition. The school is now considering building a student learning center and teaching academy for Catholic school teachers that could serve the whole diocese.

St. Joseph School principal Beverly Sandobal said that all of the existing Leeward Catholic elementary schools have dreamed of a high school in the vicariate.

“Now with the strategic planning going on in the diocese, I feel that they are at least having the high school as one of the items,” Sandobal said. “I think we are hoping that it would become more of a possibility.”

A Catholic high school has also been a dream for many Catholic families on Oahu’s NorthShore, which is part of the leeward Oahu vicariate.

Discussions and plans for such a school in Waialua have been in the works since 1995, resulting in tentative proposals for a social-justice based “Christian,” or possibly Catholic, school near Thomson Corner called Aloha Ke Akua (God Is Love), with a target enrollment of 500.

There are only two private schools with high school classes located within the Leeward vicariate.

Hanalani School , a nondenominational Christian school in Mililani, has had a high school since the 1970s. IslandPacificAcademy in Kapolei, which opened in 2004 with pre-kindergarten to eighth grade, started a ninth grade this school year and will add a new grade each year until the high school is complete.