Our School
About Us
Mission Statement
At St. Paul Catholic School, our mission is to ensure that all of our students are valued equally and that their unique strengths and needs are recognized and met.
How We Meet the Diverse Needs of Our Students
We meet the diverse needs of our students through:
Breakfast Club and a daily Nutrition Program.
Safe Arrival program.
Peace education strategies and a clearly articulated behaviour code.
Access to special education, enrichment/gifted, ESL, French as a Second Language (beginning in Grade 1), technology, computer literacy (21st Century Learning), and instrumental music (steel drum band) programs.
Yearly overnight excursions for Grade 8 students.
Field trips and experiential learning opportunities from Junior Kindergarten to Grade 8.
A variety of extracurricular activities, including competitive sports teams and intramurals.
Head Start, a pre-school literacy program for pre-Junior Kindergarten students established in January 1996 that utilizes the services of a retired teacher and the family resource drop-in centre.
School History And Tradition
St. Paul Catholic School has operated at its current location on Sackville Street, behind St. Paul's Basilica near the burial site of hundreds of Irish refugees from the Great Hunger of 1847, since 1959. Like St. Paul's Basilica, the school has a rich history.
The school began in 1842 with two classes, separated by a screen, in St. Paul's Basilica. In 1853, a wooden school was built on the site of the present Basilica, and in 1881, a new school was constructed on Queen Street beside the Basilica. In its early years, St. Paul Catholic School was administered by the De La Salle Brothers and the Sisters of St. Joseph.
St. Paul's Basilica, established in 1822, is the mother church and oldest Catholic community in the Archdiocese of Toronto. After the Diocese was created in 1841, Bishop Michael Power used the Basilica as his unofficial cathedral until St. Michael's Cathedral was completed in 1848.
For more than 170 years, St. Paul Catholic School has remained committed to living Christ's message through the actions of its community.
The school is named after Saint Paul, whose conversion on the road to Damascus is celebrated on January 25. After his conversion, he became a Christian, was baptized, travelled and preached to the Gentiles, wrote letters to early Christian communities, and later died a martyr in Rome.