A school was proposed in 1826 by one of the parish founders, Daniel Carroll, who had donated the land for the church. He said in a letter to Archbishop Ambrose Marechal of Baltimore that the school could be situated between Capitol Hill and the Navy Yard, and was perhaps ahead of his time in stressing the education of girls.
“In these two parts are many Catholic girls, daughters of respectable mechanics and persons in the humble walks of life, whose small pittance precludes their becoming boarders in the institution at Geo. Town, and the distance debarred them of the privileges of day-scholars,” he wrote, according to the parish’s 150th Anniversary Booklet in 1971.
We don’t know why it didn’t happen then. But, in 1866, parishioner Thomas Bayne donated land for the school. The 45 ft. x 115 ft. pressed-brick structure was built in 1867 on E Street, between Third and Fourth Streets, SE. The school’s 150th Anniversary Timeline in 2017 says the building had a shallow basement and two open upper stories.
The school opened in 1867, with Father Francis E. Boyle, St. Peter’s pastor 1862-1878, and two lay teachers as faculty. In 1868, Father Boyle contracted with the Sisters of the Holy Cross in Indiana to provide teachers. The four sisters who came that September lived at 131 C Street, SE, which also was the first location of their girls’ school, St. Cecilia’s Academy.
The parish school was renovated in 1923: Eight classrooms replaced the open spaces on the first and second floors; the basement was dug out; and fireproof stairways and separate play spaces for girls and boys were added. A new wing was added in 1936, after the Fire Department threatened closure because of overcrowding the year before, when enrollment hit 631 (in 2017, it was 230).
In the 1940s, the school added a dining room, a kindergarten, and a library. And, in 1949, after the new Archdiocese of Washington began to integrate its churches and schools, the first African-American students were admitted to St. Peter’s.
A number of changes occurred in the pastorate of Father Michael O’Sullivan, 1970-2005. The school roof was replaced in 1971 after it blew off in high winds; the school became St. Peter’s Interparish School, consolidating from 1974 to 1977 the schools of St. Peter’s, St. Joseph’s, St. Vincent de Paul’s, and St. Dominic’s parishes; and an extensive school renovation in 1977 was funded largely by the sale of some of the school’s lot facing D Street, SE.
In 1986, the school lost its last Holy Cross sister as principal and hired its first lay principal, Mary Randolph. She has been followed by three others: Pamela Klobukowski in 2000, Jennifer Ketchum in 2008, and Karen Clay, the current principal, in 2017.
St. Peter School, as it’s now known, was recognized in both 2013 and 2019 by the U.S. Department of Education as a National Blue Ribbon School, one of 50 private schools nationwide deemed “Exemplary High Performing.” In addition to reading and math, St. Peter students excel in Catholic social teaching. For many years, they have cared for the local environment, fed hungry and homeless Hill neighbors, and aided their fellow students at Notre Dame d’Altagrace, St. Peter’s twin parish in Haiti.
Blue ribbon, indeed!
The original pressed-brick school building faces
E Street, between Third and Fourth, SE.