Religious Institutions and Schools
Catholic Schools (a)
Originally published by the Berkeley Herald. Robert B. Honeyman, Jr. Collection of Early Californian and Western American Pictorial Material of the Bancroft Library's digital archives housed at the Online Archive of California.
The first schools in the District were Catholic – a girls’ school held in a room of the Sisters of Presentation Convent, built in 1878 on the property James McGee gave to the Sisters, and St. Peter’s Boys School, built close by in 1881. Irishborn Mother Mary Teresa Comerford was the founder and head sister of the Convent. Her older brother, Father Pierce Michael Comerford, headed the boys’ school. He had been recruited by his sister to join her in Berkeley in 1878 and had been named Parish Priest of the newly created St. Joseph’s Parish the same year.
Over the years, these two schools developed into Presentation High School for girls and co- educational St. Joseph’s Elementary School. Both enjoyed a distinguished educational reputation and served thousands of students in Berkeley and nearby cities. By the late 1980s a combination of factors – decreased enrollment, higher expenses, a drastic decrease in the number of sisters teaching, and a fiscal crisis in the Oakland Diocese forced the closure of Presentation High School in 1988. Almost twenty years later, in 2007, the elementary school, for the same reasons, closed its doors. Today there are no longer any Catholic schools in the District.