However, now school president Richard Elmer is looking at some free land in Novi for another move.
"We had a piece of property donated to us," says Ed Turek, the school's director of marketing and public relations. "We've outgrown this school, which was a former middle school that we converted into a high school. We thought it would be in our best interests to move to a larger area."
An alumnus provided the school with 50 acres of wooded land at Wixom and Grand River roads in Novi. "We've had the property appraised, it's worth about $8.4 million," Turek tells GlobeSt.com proudly.
The land sits adjacent to a booming retail and industrial area, along I-96 near Wixom and Downtown Novi. He says Elmer spoke at the Novi city council meeting recently, discussing possible plans to move and discussing what different requirements must be met to change the land for a school. The area has a lot of wooded and wetland area, Turek says.
It will cost about $34 million to build a new school, being raised by alumni dollars, he notes.
"We're excited about the possibility, but it's not completely definite yet. We should find out if everything is a go in about six months, and will be able to physically move in four to five years from now," Turek says. The site is about 14 miles west of the school's current location.
"Our priority was just to stay in the Archdiocese of Detroit, and we will. We would have liked to move closer, but this is a good amount of free land, and we wanted more acres to build a better campus setting that will last us the next 50 to 100 years. There's just not a lot of cheap, available land left."
The school was established in 1928 in Detroit.
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