Old Parish Classrooms, New Charter Students: Launch High School Settles Into Sunset Park

Launch Schools has signed a long-term lease on a former Catholic school building in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, giving its growing high school a permanent home just in time for the new academic year. The charter network confirmed the move this week as custodial crews put final coats of paint on classrooms ahead of the first day of classes after Labor Day.

The red-brick schoolhouse, which for generations educated the children of the neighborhood's immigrant families before closing in a round of parish consolidations, sat largely quiet in recent years. Under the agreement, Launch will occupy the full building, including its gymnasium, science rooms and top-floor classrooms that once held rows of uniformed parochial students.

The deal ends a prolonged search for the high school, which has bounced between shared and temporary spaces since it opened. School leaders have described the hunt for a permanent site as the network's most persistent operational challenge, a familiar struggle for charter schools in New York, which are not guaranteed facility space and often pay for real estate out of their own operating budgets.

The building's availability carries its own history. The Diocese of Brooklyn, which oversees Catholic parishes in both Brooklyn and Queens, has closed or merged dozens of schools over the past two decades as enrollment declined and parish budgets tightened. Each closure has left behind not just empty classrooms but a hole in the civic life of neighborhoods that once organized their calendars around parish feast days and school pageants.

Some longtime residents grieve the final chapter of Catholic education in the building; others say they are simply relieved it will remain a school.

Sunset Park felt those losses acutely. The neighborhood, one of the city's densest immigrant communities, stretches from the Latino commercial strips along Fourth and Fifth Avenues to Brooklyn's Chinatown on Eighth Avenue, and its families have long depended on a patchwork of district, parochial and charter options. When the parish school shut its doors, parents scattered in all three directions.

Reaction to the lease on the surrounding blocks has been mixed but largely pragmatic. Some longtime residents grieve the final chapter of Catholic education in the building; others say they are simply relieved it will remain a school rather than be sold off for condominium conversion, the fate of several religious properties elsewhere in Brooklyn.

Across the five boroughs, shuttered parochial buildings have found second lives as charter schools, pre-kindergarten centers and community facilities. Brokers who specialize in school real estate say the buildings, with their high ceilings, wide stairwells and existing classrooms, often convert more cheaply than office or retail space, even when aging boilers and roof repairs push renovation budgets higher.

Launch, which runs an expeditionary learning program built around extended student projects and fieldwork, plans to phase the high school into the building grade by grade. Students admitted through the charter lottery will find a facility the network says it could never have built from scratch in a neighborhood where large parcels rarely come to market.

For now, the signs of transition are small and practical: new signage over the front gate, fresh lines on the schoolyard pavement, boxes of textbooks stacked in the foyer. On the first morning of classes, a building that once emptied of students for good will fill with them again.