Established in 2006 with 58 seventh graders; College Pierre Toussaint currently has enrolled over 200 students in Grades 7-13.
In June of 2013 College Pierre Toussaint graduated 50 students from Grade 12 and 11 students from Grade 13. Most of the graduates from Grade 13 at CPT are currently attending various universities in Haiti, preparing themselves to become their community and country’s future leaders and professionals. nurses, engineers, doctors, agronomist, teachers, etc.
Articles:
New York’s Toussaint Scholars Send Congratulations to Namesakes in Haiti
By Ron LaJoie
While the Class of 2013 in the Archdiocese of New York was celebrating graduation ceremonies in late May and early June, the graduating class of College Pierre Toussaint still had a few weeks to go.But it will be an historic day, indeed, when graduates of the school in Sassier, rural southwestern Haiti, line up to receive their diplomas June 23. It will be the school’s first graduating class, with some 20 Grade 13 students and 40 Grade 12 students picking up their diplomas. College Pierre Toussaint has strong ties to the Archdiocese of New York. Not only does it take its name from the Venerable Haitian-born, 19th century New Yorker interred in the crypt under the altar at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, but the archdiocese’s Office of Black Ministry helps to support the school, which opened in September 2006 with a seventh-grade class. The school has added a grade each subsequent year to Grade 13, which under the Haitian education system is the grade that must be attained to advance to university. Grade 12 students graduate to other colleges. To mark the occasion, the archdiocese’s own Pierre Toussaint Scholars have been sending congratulations to the graduates of their namesake school.
Impossible Dream Comes True at Haiti’s College Pierre Toussaint
By Ron LaJoie
At age 27, Willio Methelus is finally getting his high school diploma. He has never been held back and has maintained outstanding grades since he started school, he proudly declares. But like most children in rural Haiti, he didn�t have much chance to get an education.His father is disabled and so for most of his childhood he worked the family’s subsistence farm with his sisters and brothers tending to the goats and dreaming of the day he could go to school.That chance finally came when he was 15. Was he embarrassed to be sitting in a classroom with kids half his size and half his age?I never worried about it, the willowy young man, who doesn�t look much older than his graduating classmates, told Catholic New York in Creole through an interpreter at St. Jean Baptiste parish rectory in the tiny mountain village of Sassier in rural southwest Haiti…