Catholic school nears fundraising goal for new gym, performance space

With donations ranging in size from students’ tooth fairy money to a $1 million gift from a former pupil’s grandparents, St. Paul Catholic School leaders have raised more than 75% of the funds needed to replace their aging gymnasium.

The small private school in north Eugene started its capital campaign in 2018, initially hoping to raise about $6.7 million. That amount grew to $9.6 million after the pandemic.

The school hopes to break ground in 2026 on a multipurpose activity center if it secures the amount required to receive a bridge loan from the Archdiocese of Portland. The building will house a middle school regulation-sized basketball court, bleachers and a stage that will also convert to a music room. 

A need for more space

About 280 students, from preschool to eighth grade, attend St. Paul. To remain a place of high quality education, however, the school is in need of an infrastructure update, principal Christine Penwell said.

St. Paul uses a building constructed in the 1980s as its gym, auditorium and cafeteria. It serves as a before-school hang-out spot for middle school students, gets constant gym and lunch use during the day, and hosts middle school sports after school, Penwell said. It’s also where the school holds convocations and its annual spring musical. Last year’s performance was “The Sound of Music,” and this year’s will be “Aladdin.”

“We love the academic piece of our school and being able to do the normal things like math and reading and language arts,” Penwell said. “But the ability to join in a space as a community is really huge for us.”

Autumn Whittaker, St. Paul’s capital campaign manager, said with its age, the building is getting more expensive to maintain. It also lacks what other school gymnasiums now have: bleachers for spectators, wood floors that make falls softer and a raised stage for performances.

Right now, the basketball court at St. Paul is not regulation size and allows for only one team on the court at a time. The new building would allow two teams to practice at once.

St. Paul plans to add cafeteria seating space and a kitchen to the multipurpose building with future fundraising. Right now, the school offers catered hot lunch three days a week, because its kitchen is too small to prepare large amounts of food. As the school fundraises for the cafeteria addition, the old gym can be used as the lunchroom, freeing up the gym for activities.

Almost to the finish line 

Two years into the fundraising campaign for the new multipurpose building, COVID-19 hit and construction costs skyrocketed.

Whittaker said the school took a year and a half break from fundraising during the pandemic, and when it resumed the campaign in 2021, increased construction costs brought the estimate for the building up by nearly $3 million to a total of $9.6 million.

The school hired local firm Lund Development Services to reinvigorate fundraising efforts and to date, the school has raised about $7.3 million from donations and grants, including a $300,000 grant from the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, a foundation focused on supporting educational, social, spiritual and cultural causes in the Pacific northwest.

The majority of the $7.3 million has come from St. Paul Catholic Church families, current school families and alumni. The school opened in 1956, and despite it being a preschool to eighth-grade program, adult alumni remember and cherish their time there, Whittaker said. St. Paul families pay $8,230 for full-time enrollment for the 2025-26 school year. 

“We are excited to see our facilities represent who we are as a school, as a parish,” Whittaker said. “Right now, it looks pretty run down, and that’s not who we are. Our parish and our community are just very vibrant and young and involved and engaged, and we want to be able to show that and represent it to our community.”