From Parish Classrooms to Charter Labs: A Shuttered Sunset Park School Gets a Second Life

A brick schoolhouse that once educated generations of Sunset Park's Catholic children will ring with student voices again. Launch Schools has signed a lease for the former parochial school building in the Brooklyn neighborhood, giving its growing high school a permanent address after years spent in temporary and shared quarters.

The building, which sits in the shadow of its parish church along one of the neighborhood's busy commercial corridors, offers what the charter network's leased spaces never could: a full gymnasium, a schoolyard, science-ready classrooms and enough floors to enroll a complete high school program. Administrators plan to renovate over the coming months, upgrading laboratories, wiring the building for modern coursework and restoring common spaces that sat quiet after the parish school closed.

Launch Schools built its reputation with an expeditionary learning model — long-term student projects, fieldwork and close-knit advisory groups — first at its Brooklyn middle school and later at a high school that has added a grade each year. Network leaders had searched across several neighborhoods for a site large enough to house upperclassmen through graduation, and the Sunset Park property checked every box: space, transit access and a location within reach of the immigrant families the network largely serves.

The deal reflects one of the defining pressures of New York City's charter sector: finding buildings. Charters that operate outside city-owned space must secure their own facilities, and while state law provides rental assistance to many qualifying schools, suitable properties in dense neighborhoods are scarce. Former parochial schools — built for hundreds of children, often with gyms, auditoriums and kitchens already in place — have become some of the most sought-after real estate in the charter world.

Those buildings have come available for a painful reason. The Diocese of Brooklyn, which covers Brooklyn and Queens, has closed or consolidated dozens of schools over the past two decades as enrollment slid, parish subsidies stretched thin and the pandemic pushed already struggling schools over the edge. Each closure emptied a building that had anchored its block, leaving parishes to weigh maintenance costs against the pull of residential development.

Sunset Park itself has never stopped needing classroom seats. The neighborhood, home to one of the city's largest Chinese communities alongside long-established Latino families, has packed its public schools for years, and local parents routinely describe scrambling for quality high school options close to home. A high school that occupies a familiar building near the neighborhood's subway lines and bus routes answers a demand that outlasted the parish school's final bell.

Reaction on surrounding blocks has mixed nostalgia with relief. Alumni of the parish school recall First Communions, Christmas pageants and nuns who taught two generations of the same family, and some grieve that the building will no longer carry its old name. But neighbors also say they worried the property would sell to developers, and many prefer desks and lockers to another condominium tower. For the parish, the lease delivers steady income to maintain the church and its remaining ministries.

The Sunset Park arrangement follows a pattern repeated across the five boroughs, where charter operators have moved into closed Catholic schools in neighborhoods from Bedford-Stuyvesant to the South Bronx. Education historians note the symmetry: the parochial system once absorbed waves of immigrant children that public schools could not hold, and charter networks now court many of the same working-class families with promises of smaller classes and intensive college preparation.

Launch Schools expects to welcome students after renovations wrap, with enrollment open to families across the city through the standard charter admissions lottery. For a building that has heard more than a century of morning prayers and afternoon dismissal bells, the next school year will bring a different vocabulary — project exhibitions, crew meetings and college counseling — under the same tall windows that watched Sunset Park grow up around it.