Smooth Start to School Year at Loyola High School on UES

Tony Oroszlany, president of Loyola High School, was outside the doors to the 125-year-old coeducational Jesuit school on Sept. 4 greeting juniors as they returned for their first day of class.

While he was there, a steady steam of students came by, and he’d chat briefly with them about their summer and urge them to get inside or they’d be late for the opening bell.

“I have to get inside myself to welcome them back in three minutes,” he told Our Town.

While we chatted, a neighborhood mom stopped by. “Her three kids all graduated from Loyola,” Oroszlany said after she continued strolling down the block toward Park Ave. “The last one graduated 14 years ago.”

But while it was all cheerful and upbeat outside the elite school of 205 students in grades 9-12, Oroszlany’s mood turned very serious when we asked him about the school shooting in Minneapolis, which killed 8-year-old Fletcher Merkel and a 10-year-old Harper Mayski and wounded 19 others, including a 13 other students and three elederly A transgender individual identified as Robin Westman, opened fire on kids attending an opening-day Mass before turning the gun on himself and fired 161 shots through a stained glass window. Like the Annunciation School in Minneapolis, Loyola High School on East 83rd Street is attached to a 127-year-old landmarked church, St. Ignatius Loyola Church on Park Avenue.

”We always have an awareness of security,” Oroszlany said. “We’re always in contact with the 19th Precinct and security professionals. Our primary responsibility is protecting kids. Nothing is more important than children.”

The NYPD on the morning after the Minneapolis shooting said it was stepping up security at all churches “out of an abundance of caution” but added there were “no credible threats against churches and houses of worship in the city.” But there was little noticeable police activity around any churches in recent days, Our Town found.

No police vehicles were visible in the vicinity of St. Ignatius Loyola Church, which also has a separate Loyola elementary school, with kids in grades nursery through 8th grade odn Sept. 4 when Our Town visited. A Mass for all the high school students on Sept. 5 proceeded without incident.

The cell phone ban was receiving lots of attention as a bell-to-bell ban on mobile devices in the city’s public schools had gone into effect the morning of Sept. 4. There was no Archdiocesan edict for Catholic schools, Oroszlany said.

“Each school makes an independent decision,” he said. “For us, we have a policy that you can’t have cell phones in the classroom.”

But unlike the public schools where the ban was expected to take place last year before it was paused at the last minute by Eric Adams, in part because of objections on how it was to be implementated by the teachers union, the ban at the private co-ed school is far older. “We have not allowed cell phones to be used or visible in classrooms for many years now,” Oroszlany said. But it is not as sweeping as the bell to bell ban in the public schools.

“The overall choice is a delicate balance, but not being distracted by your phones in classrooms is a primary goal,” he said, adding, “Phones are allowed in the cafeteria, but their use is closely monitored.”