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Our Lady of Mercy to Stay Until 2023

Our Lady of Mercy (OLM), the main Catholic elementary school serving Madison and Guilford, is set to stay in Madison until 2023 after receiving another extension on the property lease. News broke in January 2016 that OLM would lose its lease for the school building and land on Neck Road and the school community came together to find a new home.

Now, after more than a year of work, the Vision 2018 Committee—the group tasked with finding a new home for the school—has announced that the original lease extension to 2019 has been extended once again to 2023, giving the committee more time to chart a new course for the school.

OLM was founded in 1954 and educates students from kindergarten to 8th grade. The school, which is administered by the parishes of St. George in Guilford and St. Margaret in Madison, leases its Neck Road facility from The Sisters of Mercy, which announced in 2016 that it will not renew the school’s lease after the 2017-’18 session.

The Sisters of Mercy owns the nearly 40 acres of land on Neck Road that is home to the Mercy by the Sea retreat center as well as the school. Representatives from the Sisters of Mercy said after the announcement was made that the Sisters of Mercy hopes to preserve the land the school currently sits on, possibly through a conservation trust.

The Vision 2018 Committee—now going by the name the Vision Committee—originally considered three options for the school in future: purchasing the current building, taking over an existing shoreline school building, or building or renovating a new school. After some investigation, Vision 2018 Committee member Paul Bauer said this March that the committee decided the third option is the best choice to support 21st-century Catholic education.

Now this month, the Vision Committee announced that the school can stay in its current location until 2023, which Bauer said gives the committee more time to find the best, and most feasible option, for the school.

“It has been a very all encumbering process that we had been going through where all the parents were concerned, all of the teachers were concerned, the administration was concerned as to how we were going to get this done and now we can all basically take a collective deep breath and get it done in the right way—do the feasibility study and figure out what the best way is,” he said.

Why the Sisters of Mercy elected to extend the lease again is a mystery to those at OLM, but with the Vision Committee currently looking to build or renovate a building for the school, Bauer said this gives the community more time to complete a feasibility study to determine how much money can be raised for the move and possible construction.

“We have different figures on different options and they are pretty wide ranging right now,” he said. “We do have a very healthy endowment at the moment from generous donors, so we are not starting from zero.”

The committee is looking at buildings along the shoreline, but is hoping to keep the school in Madison or Guilford. Right now Bauer said the committee is open to what the new school might look like.

“Is it new construction, is it rehabbing another building, and what will the next generation of OLM look like?” he asked. “The school has been around for 60 years, but it is in a building that was built for education back then...Although we have kept up on it, now it is an old building. We can make something that really fits the current trends in education going forward.”

With the lease extension in hand, Bauer said the committee hopes to have hard numbers from the feasibility study by October. From there, Bauer said the committee can determine what happens next.

“We have a lot of information we have gathered so far and, based on the feasibility study, we can make decisions based on what our capital campaign goals would be,” he said.