St. Anthony Catholic School

St. Anthony Parish began as a mission church in 1915 on Concord Street. It became a parish in 1942 and was moved to the present site in 1955. In 1956, the first school building was built, opening with grades one, two, and three and staffed by the Daughters of Mary and Joseph. A fourth grade was added the following year and in 1958 the second building was completed, allowing the school to grow by one more class each year.

The school operated as an eight-classroom school for seventeen years when low enrollment forced first and second grade to be taught in one classroom. This trend continued so that in 1979 St. Anthony’s student body included grade 1-8 in four classrooms, using the other rooms in the school for office, visual aides , a religious education office and a meeting room.

In 1986, the goal of single grade classes began to be implemented. The combination class of grades one and two was split into separate classes in January of 1986. The following school year grades three and four also were separated. This process continued until the last class was split in the fall of 1989, providing for a K-8 classroom school.

A program to increase school enrollment began in the fall of 1987, when a Kindergarten class was added to the school. An extended day care program was initiated in the spring of 1987 to serve the needs of working families and to promote the goal of increased school enrollment.

Construction plans began in 1988 to add one additional classroom and to expand the office and faculty room, thus providing more space for a growing school population. With the completion of this project, St. Anthony became a nine classroom school with adequate space for the development of existing school programs and the addition of any new programs required.

St. Anthony School serves the families of St. Anthony Parish and surrounding communities with a strong Catholic environment. The Daughters of Mary and Joseph taught in the school from its opening through June 1971. Three Carmelite Sisters and a lay teacher staffed the school in the 1971- 1972 school year. Since then the school has been operating under a lay administration and faculty.

The Sister Servants of the Blessed Sacrament inhabited the convent adjacent to the school from 1986-2006. The administrators of the order decided to move the Sisters to their large communities in the San Diego and San Fernando Valley areas in June 2006 thus creating an entire lay faculty for the first time. In order to expand the services to families of the parish and surrounding communities with younger children, St. Anthony Parish opened a preschool on Lomita Street in September 2006.