EPHRATA — St. Rose of Lima Catholic School is expanding to include middle school. The program, called St. Rose Preparatory, will hold its first classes this fall.

It’s been a long time coming, said St. Rose Principal Amy Krautscheid.

“We tried to do this about 15 years ago,” Krautscheid said, “We didn’t have the interest and the numbers, and everything kept shutting down, and we just figured it wasn’t God’s will. So we tabled it.”

Krautscheid retired for a few years and returned four years ago, she said, and found things had changed.

“There were parents asking and asking and asking for middle school,” she said. “I said, well, we’ve tried that before, but it didn’t work. They were so persistent that I said, ‘OK, maybe now is the time.’ We started again and this time every door has opened. It’s just been amazing.”

An anonymous donor chipped in the first $5,000, Krautscheid said, and more donors followed. The Bureau of Reclamation designed the landscaping, and another donor purchased the plants. The school already had classroom space available, in the form of a portable on the campus. For a while, the Ephrata School District rented the building for early childhood education, Krautscheid said, and then it served as a temporary parish office when the one at the church flooded two years ago. Donors stepped up to fix the roof and gutters, and the whole thing has been repainted.

“We’re fitting it with new everything so that it’s ready for a productive middle school,” Krautscheid said.

One side of the two-room portable is a classroom, Krautscheid said, and the other is a science room with metal tables and all the equipment.

St. Rose is part of the Catholic Diocese of Yakima, which includes Grant County, as well as Benton, Chelan, Douglas, Kittitas, Klickitat and Yakima counties. St. Rose Prep will be the fifth Catholic school in the diocese to offer middle school, according to the diocese’s website, and the one located in the smallest community.

The program will be seventh grade only in 2026-27, and add an eighth-grade class the following year, Krautscheid said. Some current St. Rose sixth-graders will advance into the program, she said, and enrollment will open in the next few months to students from outside the school. The program is capped at 20 children.

The math and science curricula have been selected, she said. The school is still looking for a history and social studies curriculum.

Being a Catholic school, religion classes are part of every St. Rose student’s education, regardless of their church membership if any.

St. Rose Prep is a hybrid program coordinated with the Ephrata School District. Students will spend the last period of the day at Ephrata Middle School, according to the school’s website, to participate in elective classes, athletics and after-school clubs.

“That gives them that chance to build familiarity with the kids around them, make more friendships, and then when they go into high school, they’ll know faces,” Krautscheid said. “They won’t be a stranger.”

The small class size will be especially important because not all the children learn at the same level, Krautscheid said, and individual attention is important.

“With 20 kids in a class, you have not only that Christ-centered education, but you’ve got that strong academic rigor that they’re going to get every day,” she said. “We have special ed, we have (English language learner) kids. We have the gamut. The beautiful part of it is we know every hair on every head of every kid in this school, so they get academics at their level.”

More information on St. Rose Catholic School, including St. Rose Prep, can be found at the school’s website: www.saintroseschool.org

    A classroom in the newly-revamped portable at St. Rose of Lima Catholic School is ready for its first class of seventh-graders.
  

    St. Rose of Lima Catholic School third-grade teacher Kelly Sackmann introduces her students’ artwork up for bid at the school's annual fundraiser auction. The school, which is adding middle school classes this fall, has a policy of never turning away students based on ability to pay.