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ST. PAUL COLLEGE OF PARAÑAQUE

HISTORY:

On June 11, 1945, St. Paul College of Paranaque was founded. Responding to the invitation of the Paranaque Belgian parish priest, Reverend Father Adolf Cansse, CICM, to manage a girls’ high school. In the wake of World War II and the Japanese Occupation, five SPC Sisters headed by Sister Anne Patrice Cahill (Irish) as Superior-Principal came: Sister Michaela Pateros (dormitory matron), Sister Teresita of St. Paul Soledad, Sister Teresa de Jesus Barot, and Sister Marie Therese Crisologo.

Since St. Paul College of Manila was just a heap of rubble then, other Sisters could come from Manila to teach every day: Sister Maria Teresita “Tita” Gonzalez, Sister Cristeta Ponce, Sister Leonor Lazo, Sister Mary Milagros Calaycay, Sister Zephyrine, and Sister Helen Valdes. A lay faculty member, Miss Paz Darjuan, came with them to teach Mathematics. About twenty young girls, students of St. Paul College of Manila at the outbreak of the war, came to continue their schooling here, living as boarders in the crude, make-shift dormitory improvised for them – among them, Piedad Guinto-Rosales, Elenita Corpus (who became Mrs. Bolipata, the mother of the musician Bolipata brothers), and Estelita Juco.

When St. Paul College of Manila opened, they all returned to Manila except Estelita Juco who graduated as high school valedictorian from St. Paul’s Paranaque in 1948. Classes were held in the St. Andrew’s Parish convent, adjacent to the parish church. There were no combats in Parañaque in the post-liberation period, but once in a while there were explosions somewhere in the distance which shook the old building and pellets of cement would crumble from the walls.

The windows had no shutters except canvass cloth, and the stage for flag ceremony and the distribution of card was the staircase. The first graduation was on an improvised stage near the old wooden convent-turned-school. At the end of its first year of operation, the school had its first graduates: thirty-one of them. There were eight sections: one in the fourth year, one in the third year, two in second year and four in the first year.

Classes were held in half-day sessions in order to accommodate all the students. The first yearbook was published in the school year 1948-1949 entitled “The Bell Tower Annual,” its pages depicting the important activities and memorable incidents of the year. After a year, the Sisters moved to the present site which in 1945 was still occupied by American soldiers up to the official surrender of the Japanese in August 1945. The Sisters built one-story structures, Quonset huts, using the scrap materials left by the US Army, under the age-old acacia trees by the sea. The population of the school continued to grow, which made it necessary to expand the school buildings from the remains of war to a modest wooden building. In the beginning, the school director was the parish priest, but eventually full management of the school became the Sisters’ responsibility. Arrangements were made with the CICM Fathers that St. Paul College accept boys from pre-school to Grade Four after which the boys were to continue at St. Andrew’s School from Grade Five to Fourth Year High School.

However, with the increase in population and with the limited physical facilities in the fifties, the SPCP Directress, Sister Romaine Formoso, asked the Archbishop of Manila to accept only girls. Thus, St. Andrew’s was constrained to put up a building to accommodate younger boys, and so, St. Paul College became a school exclusively for girls, and St. Andrew’s became exclusively a school for boys, except for pre-school which was still co-educational at St. Paul’s until 1976. About the year 2000, however, St. Andrew’s started admitting girls in the grade school; and in SY 2004-2005, St. Paul’s opened its gates once again to boys up to third grade, and to first year high school, and to the subsequent grade levels from year to year.

The Sisters and the CICM Fathers had good working relationships from the beginning, cooperating with one another not only in the education of the youth of Parañaque and the surrounding areas, but also in liturgy, and pastoral work. When Father Paul Foulon in his stint as parish priest and school director learned that the Sisters were to pay ten thousand pesos annually as rental fee for the land St. Paul College occupied, to the Archdiocese of Manila, which had jurisdiction of the parish at that time, he took it upon himself to negotiate with the archdiocese to exempt the Sisters since the land belonged to the parish and the Sisters were serving the people of the parish. The archdiocese granted the exemption.

St. Paul College of Parañaque became an ideal institution for the growth and development of young ladies since the school offered a curriculum for the total formation of the individual, hence, the increase of student population every year. To accommodate the increase in enrolment, several renovations and constructions including the location of the Sisters’ Convent followed.At present, one can see even from a distance the four-story St. Paul the Apostle Administration Building and Education Complex facing Quirino Avenue. The building is the realization of a dream of any school administrator. The first floor consists of the library and the different administrative offices; the second and third floors have the grade school classes, and part of the third floor accommodates the Science laboratories. Major activities and assemblies are held in the gymnasium-auditorium on the fourth floor. An elevator is provided for the convenience of the elderly and the handicapped.

Another four-storey structure houses the canteen on the first floor, dormitories, the THE laboratories, and a swimming pool, on the second, third and fourth floors respectively. The two-storey Kindergarten Building houses the Kindergarten classes and the computer laboratories. Community extension activities are part of the school’s commitment to the people of the parish. Faculty, personnel, and students take turns in visiting the disadvantaged families and communities in nearby barangays and help them with BEC sessions, catechesis, tutorial classes, and annual medical-dental missions.

Divine Providence has blessed St. Paul College Paranaque since 1945. the Sisters and their lay fellow-workers continue to seek the direction and will of the good Lord in the years that follow.