A fundraising campaign aimed at building a new Catholic high school in Baldwin County has pulled in $7.5 million in pledges from 885 donors, pushing organizers within reach of the $9.5 million goal needed to get the project off the ground, according to figures released by the Archdiocese of Mobile.
The planned campus would sit on 40 acres near the intersection of Alabama 181 and Alabama 104, a growing corridor of Baldwin County that has seen steady residential development in recent years. Under the timeline organizers have discussed, the school could open with its first two grades as early as 2017, with plans calling for eventual enrollment of 400 to 600 students. Tuition is expected to run roughly 10 to 20 percent higher than McGill-Toolen Catholic High School in Mobile, the archdiocese’s existing Catholic high school on the south side of Mobile Bay.
Campaign organizers have been tracking the fund drive publicly through a social media countdown, marking the milestone as Day 30 of the final stretch and framing donor participation as a simple yes-or-no question: are you in. The pace of pledges suggests strong buy-in from Baldwin County Catholic families and other supporters who have watched the diocese’s only current Catholic high school, McGill-Toolen, serve a broad regional draw for decades without a comparable option on the Eastern Shore side of the bay.
A public rally originally planned for late September at the Dick Higbee Road site had to be pushed back because of bad weather. Organizers have since rescheduled the event, where Archbishop Thomas J. Rodi and Catholic schools superintendent Gwen Byrd are expected to walk supporters through a construction timeline and unveil new details about the school, including its official colors. The rally is meant to serve as a public marker of how close the campaign has come to its target after months of private and parish-level solicitation.
If the campaign clears its remaining $2 million gap, construction crews could begin work on the Baldwin County site in the coming months, setting up what would be the first new Catholic high school to open in the greater Mobile Bay area in years. For Baldwin County families who have historically had to send children across the bay to McGill-Toolen for a Catholic college-preparatory education, a local option closer to home has been a long-discussed goal within the archdiocese, and the fundraising progress marks the clearest sign yet that the project is moving from concept to construction.