State Rep. Mike Marcotte (R-Coventry) has fond memories of his 12 years as a student at Sacred Heart School, a Catholic institution that occupies a promontory overlooking Lake Memphremagog and the Canadian mountains on the far shore.
“I got a great education,” Marcotte said. “I think it’s made me who I am.”
When Marcotte was a student, many of the nuns who taught there lived in a convent at the school, in the city of Newport; others lived in nearby homes with boarding students from as far away as South America.
But like many other Catholic schools in the U.S., Sacred Heart saw its enrollment peak in the 1960s and then decline. The school eventually closed, the nuns moved away, and the property has been vacant since 2007.
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The affordable housing developer RuralEdge, which owns and manages about 150 units of housing in Newport, has an agreement to buy the complex in March and convert the convent into 26 housing units. It plans to create additional housing in the school buildings in coming years. The convent property and its buildings were constructed from 1952 through 1989 and are owned by the Daughters of Charity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Littleton, N.H.
RuralEdge has agreed with the State Division for Historic Preservation to retain some of the character of the rambling brick property, said executive director Patrick Shattuck. The school is located next to St. Mary Star of the Sea, a large stone Catholic church that is still in active use.
“It’s been a really interesting design challenge,” Shattuck said. “The entire site and all the buildings were deemed as contributing to the evolution of a religious site.”
Sacred Heart was a basketball powerhouse in its day, and Shattuck is hoping to retain some of the glass cases — and trophies — that line the school’s wide corridors. He’s talked to the project architects about how to convert the high school gym into condominiums, complete with the four original basketball hoops.
“Having one of those in your living room would be cool,” Shattuck said.
RuralEdge will pay $600,000 to purchase the 8.5-acre property and another $9 million to clean up asbestos in the convent, which was built in 1969, and create the apartments. The project will be funded with COVID-19 aid that the state set aside for housing, investment from Community National Bank, financing from the Vermont Community Loan Fund and tax credits.
Shattuck said he’s received a lot of queries from people who attended the school and want to live at the convent. RuralEdge plans four phases of construction over the next 10 years and has permission from the city to put in another 110 units of housing on the site, Shattuck said. Some will be market rate and some permanently affordable.
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The small city of Newport hugs the shoreline of the lake shared by Vermont and Québec. Housing costs are up; the median listing price of a home in Newport jumped nearly 30 percent from October 2021 to October 2022, to $215,000, according to Realtor.com. Newport is the seat of Orleans County, where the average household income of a renter is around $35,229, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. The statewide average in Vermont is $41,248.
Shattuck said housing pressures have increased recently because growth at the nearby Jay Peak ski area has prompted some property owners to turn their long-term rentals into short-term ones.
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But house prices in the area are also easing slightly, said Sen. Russ Ingalls (R-Essex-Orleans), who works as a real estate agent. He said he has sold about 20 houses in Newport over the last year, a third of them to people from out of state.
“It’s starting to go the other way now,” he said of the market. “I expect that most of these houses I’ve sold to out-of-staters will sell again soon, as soon as they figure out we roll the carpets up at 8 o’clock at night and it’s really quiet.”
Marcotte, who owns a gas station and convenience store in town, graduated from the high school at Sacred Heart in 1977. He said the school once occupied an important place in the city and surrounding area. The basketball team competed across the border in Québec and at high schools around the Northeast Kingdom.
“A lot of state championships were won,” Marcotte said. He’s glad the long-empty campus will be used for housing.
“That’s desperately needed,” he said. “It’s going to be really good for Newport.”
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