Ceremony blesses new high school

Zachary Hoopes was so enamored with former Pope John Paul II that he decided to take John Paul as his Confirmation name.

On Sunday, the rising freshman at Pope John Paul the Great High School shared that tidbit at the school’s blessing ceremony in Dumfries. Zachary also explained why he applied for admission at PJP — the first Arlington Diocese high school to be built in Prince William County.

The reasons were various, from the expectation of an excellent education to the lifestyle Catholic schools promote.

“Students are encouraged to live their faith and deepen their relationship with Christ at Catholic high schools,” Zachary said to the more than 1,000 people gathered at the ceremony.

After the ceremony — in which Arlington Diocese Bishop Paul S. Loverde blessed the school — attendees milled around the facility, meeting and greeting various faculty members.  Many families and future students were seeing the school for the first time and were visibly impressed with the $55 million facility.

Brian Strickland, 15, will be playing football as a freshman at PJP. A former student of Aquinas School in Woodbridge, Brian liked everything he’d seen.

“Everything is great, I can’t pick one thing over another,” said Brian as he and his mother Lori Strickland checked out the science laboratory. “It’s just amazing.”

For incoming freshman Taylor Barron, attending school in a safe environment like PJP’s was important. Taylor, 14, and her family had just moved from Charleston, S.C., and literally arrived at their home in Aquia Harbor in Stafford County just hours before the school ceremony.

“We actually picked where we live based on the fact that there was a Catholic school [nearby],” said mother Lisa Baron.

And then there was Shaina Crowhurst. The 15-year-old Gainesville resident and former Seton School student wanted a change of pace with more to offer than the tiny Catholic school in Manassas.
While there will only be 200 freshmen and sophomores enrolled this fall, PJP was constructed to handle 1,000 students.  That’s nearly three times the enrollment at Seton, which also educates seventh- and eighth-graders.

Shaina will have a longer commute now — she will be taking a bus from Holy Trinity Church in Gainesville to school every day. However, the larger variety of classes and the school’s Bioethics program, which deals with such hot-button issues as stem cell research, human cloning and euthanasia, was too good to turn down, said her father, Dean Crowhurst.