St. Thomas Aquinas High School

St. Thomas Aquinas High School is a coeducational Catholic high school in Dover, New Hampshire, United States, in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Manchester. It has a student population of approximately 455 and a faculty of 55. History In August 1959, Matthew F. Brady, Bishop of Manchester, opened the fundraising drive for St. Thomas Aquinas High School. When Bishop Brady suddenly died, Cardinal Richard Cushing of Boston kept his last project alive. Cardinal Cushing greeted the new bishop, Ernest J. Primeau, with the advice, "Go on with St. Thomas Aquinas." The diocesan co-educational school opened in 1960 with a freshman class only. Serving seventeen parishes in southeastern New Hampshire, the school was staffed by two diocesan priests, seven School Sisters of Notre Dame and one layman. When STA graduated its class of 219 in 1964, the faculty had grown to six priests, twenty-one sisters (requiring a new convent) and four lay teachers. By the late 1960s, enrollment topped nine hundred students, making St. Thomas Aquinas a Class L power in athletics. A nationwide trend toward declining enrollments, combined with the higher cost of salaries as the number of teaching sisters fell, brought St. Thomas through a series of challenges throughout the 1970s.