Cistercian Preparatory School

Cistercian Preparatory School is a Roman Catholic school for young men located in Irving, Texas, in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Dallas. Serving grades five through twelve (though previously having a 4th grade pre-form), the school has a population of about 350 boys. Each grade is assigned a priest or a dedicated teacher as a "Form Master," who follows the class over the years and is responsible for building a feeling of community.The school's roots lie with a group of Cistercians who came to Texas in 1956 to help found the University of Dallas, located adjacent to what would become the Cistercian campus. Later that year, an uprising in communist Hungary allowed a group from Zirc Abbey in western Hungary to escape, and they joined their colleagues in Texas. The monks of Zirc had a long tradition of teaching in the abbey's college preparatory schools, so in 1962 they started Cistercian Preparatory School to continue their work in secondary education.Noted for its academic rigor, Cistercian has been rated one of the most prestigious private schools in the Dallas-Fort Worth region, and was ranked #50 in Business Insider's 2015 ranking of the "smartest private high schools in the United States," and as the second-best Catholic high school in the country by Niche in 2016. One distinguishing feature of the school is that many of its classes are taught by monks from the Cistercian Order, who comprise 25% of the school's faculty.