For the first time in its 54-year-history, DeSales High School has announced it’s holding a major capital campaign.

And though the public phase of the $3 million effort was launched at the school’s annual “Benefit Feast” on Jan. 30, the DeSales community knows its campaign is already a success.

Called “Stand Up, Stand Out, Stand Proud — the Campaign for DeSales,” the fund-raising effort has received $2.4 million in pledges and contributions toward its goal. Those gifts include the largest single donation ever made to the school, a gift of $1 million made by a local businessman who wants to remain anonymous.

In an interview on Monday, Feb. 1, DeSales President Douglas Strothman and the school’s director of development Joshua Blandford said they hope to complete the public phase of the campaign over the next nine to 12 months.

The “Stand Up, Stand Out, Stand Proud” campaign’s major effort is to establish $1 million endowments in each of three areas:

• For tuition assistance for DeSales students and potential students.
• An endowment that will allow the school to attract and retain faculty and will allow the DeSales staff and faculty “continued professional development opportunities,” Blandford said.
• An endowment for the facility’s master plan improvement. About $170,000 raised during the silent portion of the campaign has already been used to replace all the school’s windows, for instance.

“There were times when a semi would rumble down Kenwood Drive and some of those old 1956 windows would just pop open,” Strothman said. Replacing them, in addition to improving the school’s appearance, has also significantly reduced the school’s utility costs.

There was a time a few years ago — about the time another South End school, Holy Rosary Academy, was forced to close its doors — that the future of DeSales High School was said to be in doubt. For the first 47 years of its history, DeSales had been subsidized by the Archdiocese of Louisville, but the school became financially independent in 2004, about the time Blandford came on board.

That significant step, both Blandford and Strothman said, was the key to securing the school’s financial security. The DeSales community stepped up to support the school, because they knew it was time to “sink or swim,” the two men said.

Strothman joined the DeSales leadership team in 2006, and during Monday’s interview he was quick to point out that the turnaround in the school’s fortunes actually began before his arrival.

“I sometimes get credit for things that were really well on the way to happening when I came,” he said. “Tim Keogh (DeSales’ late principal, who died in 2008) really helped turn things around and made some great hires, including Josh. He and Judy Heare (the school’s director of finance) have done a lot of great things for this school.”

As a result, discussions of DeSales allegedly precarious future have all but disappeared, at least in the South End, Strothman said.

“Sometimes you might hear something from someone in another part of town,” he noted. “But out here, people realize that we’re way beyond worrying about survival now. There’s no reason to even discuss that.”

The school has bridged “the I-65 barrier,” too, Strothman said, and now has several students who attend the South End school but live on the east side of that interstate highway.

“We even have one student who comes all the way from Oldham County,” he added. “We had 100 students take the placement test in December, and that’s the largest number we’ve had in several years.”

What’s happened, the pair of leaders said, is that DeSales has “solidified its present” and now, with the Stand Up, Stand Out, Stand Proud campaign, is working to shape its future. The school isn’t raising money to meet debts or operating expenses these days — it’s in the process of establishing endowments that will ensure financial stability in the future.

Those three major campaign goals lie at the heart of that effort, Strothman said.

“Take tuition assistance, for instance,” he said. “Sometimes students who’d like to go to a Catholic school like ours can’t afford the cost, and we lose them. Sometimes it’s to public schools; sometimes it’s to other Catholic schools that have more money for financial assistance.”

By establishing an endowment to help students and their families cover the cost of a DeSales education, the school will help “honor the commitment” of families who work and sacrifice to allow their young men to be educated at a small, private Catholic school.

“This campaign really speaks to what we are — and that’s a small community, a family,” the school president noted. “Our capital campaign isn’t just about the money. It’s about people, and the message we want to get out is that we are a community, a close-knit family, a place where your son can excel.”

Blandford said the school’s size allows for a “great sense of brotherhood here.”

“I think most if not all of our students know the names of everybody else in the building,” he said. “You can be a leader here in just about any club or on any team at the school. You have a chance to stand out and to not get lost in the crowd. We want our young men to realize that one person can make a really big difference in our community.”

Strothman noted that “God has blessed” the school at the beginning of the campaign two years ago, when its major donor came forward with the $1 million gift, which is being paid over five years.

“He has been actively involved with our school; he knows where we’ve been and where we’re going,” he added. “And he’s confident in what we’re doing to get there.”