New Catholic girls high school represents turnaround for Detroit area

From The Detroit Free Press: A year after starting classes in temporary space, St. Catherine of Siena Academy has opened a $17-million, state-of-the-art facility in Wixom, Mich. It is the first from-the-ground-up Catholic girls high school built in the six-county Archdiocese of Detroit since 1965, when Mercy High relocated from Detroit to Farmington Hills. And last month, near Romeo, 10 students began ninth-grade classes at Austin Catholic Academy, the start of a coed Catholic high school in northern Macomb County. The two recent openings serve Catholic families in parts of Oakland, Livingston and Macomb counties and represent a turnaround in what has been a shrinking school system. Since 1998, Catholic schools in the archdiocese have declined from 170 schools with 56,862 students to 99 schools with 32,000.