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ST. LOUIS — St. Mary's South Side Catholic High School no longer has a landlord.

The Archdiocese of St. Louis sold the 23-acre Dutchtown campus to the school last month for $1.5 million.

The purchase completes St. Mary's break from the archdiocese, which tried to close the boys' school in 2022 as part of its "All Things New" downsizing of parishes and schools.

Alumni of St. Mary's and Rosati-Kain girls' high school, which also was on the chopping block, rallied to save the schools by becoming financially independent. Rosati-Kain still leases its campus in the Central West End from the archdiocese.

The archdiocese now operates six high schools: Bishop DuBourg and Cardinal Ritter in St. Louis, St. Dominic and Duchesne in St. Charles County, St. Pius X in Jefferson County and St. Francis Borgia in Franklin County.

St. Mary’s opened as South Side Catholic High School in 1931, and reached a peak of 1,100 students in the late 1940s. Recent highlights at the school include back-to-back state championships in football in 2021 and 2022.

More than half of St. Mary's students are Black or Hispanic, higher than any other Catholic boys’ school in the archdiocese. Most of the students live within 5 miles of the campus.

Tuition at the school is about $11,000 a year, and nearly all students receive scholarships. Notable alumni include baseball player and broadcaster Joe Garagiola, auto dealer Frank Bommarito, newspaper editor and former KETC “Donnybrook� host Martin Duggan, and former Mayor Francis Slay.

"I couldn't have received a better education nor could I have had a better high school experience anywhere else," Slay said Tuesday at a news conference in the St. Mary's gym.

Enrollment has increased to 240 students this fall three years after the school added pre-apprenticeship programs for career training with support from local unions.

The program offers students "a pathway into the middle class with high wages and Cadillac benefits," said Jake Hummel, president of the Missouri AFL-CIO and a graduate of St. Mary's.

One-quarter of the 2025 graduating class will attend Ranken Technical College or start an apprenticeship in the trades this fall, according to Mike England, who is starting his 13th year as president of St. Mary's.

England said the Catholic mission of St. Mary's will not change after the separation from the archdiocese.

"We believe in what our neighborhood and city can be, and we are committed to doing the work," he said.

England also acknowledged the importance of schools as anchors in city neighborhoods, which have been losing families for decades. The nearby Scruggs Elementary and Cleveland High schools on south Grand Boulevard are long-shuttered eyesores in Dutchtown.

St. Mary's, like all other private and public schools, faces an enrollment challenge in the years ahead with a continuing decline in birth rates. The population of St. Louis is expected to drop by 7% in the next decade, including 2,000 fewer school-aged children by 2035, according to a .

The high school sits in St. John the Baptist parish, once one of the five largest in the archdiocese with a grade school of 1,000 students and a high school of 600. Parish membership has shrunk by more than half following an influx of Bosnian immigrants to the Bevo area starting in the 1990s.

St. John the Baptist High School closed in 2008. An adjacent parish, St. Anthony of Padua in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood, had a girls’ Catholic high school that closed in 1984.