Mercy commits to building gym

A gymnasium has been of particular interest. Previous efforts to raise the necessary dollars to fund construction of a gym have fallen through. This time, Mercy administrators, staff, students and alumnae hope the effort will bear fiscal fruit. This could be make-or-break time.

The lack of an all-purpose building (along with an expanded swimming pool, weight room and sprint track ) has long been a glaring deficit at the school. It remains the only Catholic secondary campus in San Mateo County without a gym.

It’s standard practice for private and parochial schools to utilize their athletic facilities and sports teams as marketing tools to maintain and increase tuition-based enrollment. Mercy, for far too long, has been hamstrung in that important department. Its athletic teams must play nearly all of their contests on the road.

The timing of the school’s move comes none too soon. Riordan High School, 18 miles north in San Francisco, recently began to admit female pupils. Riordan, a Catholic school, has a full set of athletic facilities.

What’s more, the campuses of two nearby public schools, Mills High School in Millbrae and Burlingame High School, are currently undergoing, or planning, tens of millions of dollars of modern athletic upgrades.

For Mercy, and its student body of nearly 400 girls, the competition continues to escalate. Its latest published report to its community indicates that half of a needed $27 million in construction money has already been committed.

The challenge now is to find the other half. In the report, Natalie Cirigliano Brosnan, Head of School, states that, “the time has finally come to build the dream of having greater facilities on campus.”

That dream, though, has been dashed before.

COLLAPSE OF PRINT JOURNALISM: For those of us of a certain age, the slow but steady decline of daily paid print journalism (both advertising and news) has been an ongoing spectacle that’s been painful to watch and experience.

It’s a worldwide phenomenon, courtesy of the rise of online media options available on laptops, tablets and smartphones, beginning back in the 1990s.

Paid circulation newspapers in San Mateo County like the San Mateo Times and Redwood City Tribune bit the dust years ago.

So, it has been with a marked degree of resignation and sadness to watch the persistent shrinkage of the San Francisco Chronicle, once the dominant print presence throughout much of the Bay Area and beyond back in the day. It dubbed itself the “Voice of the West.” No more.

The printed version of the venerable Chron is clearly on life support. Its own recent detailed report of its print condition revealed its dire status.

To wit: An official, required audit reported that the newspaper’s actual number of newspapers printed on an August weekday in 2021 (paid circulation) barely exceeded an utterly anemic 51,000 copies.

On the brighter side, paid online subscriptions have been reported to be over 300,000. Barring unforeseen circumstances, the eventual demise of the Hearst-owned Chronicle’s printed version, which began in 1865, seems inevitable at some point.

When that does occur, it will be a sorry day indeed — no matter what your feelings may be about the publication’s editorial policies.

A CELEBRATION IN SAN MATEO: U.S. Army Col. Antoinette Gant, a civil engineering specialist and Mississippi native, was recently feted at a celebratory event in San Mateo to mark her anticipated promotion to brigadier general.

The gala affair was hosted by former San Mateo Mayor Claire Mack in her North Central residential neighborhood. The accomplished and decorated Col. Gant, who has been the commander of the Army Corps of Engineers’ South Pacific Region for several years, is a resident of San Bruno.

An announcement of her promotion to higher rank was expected soon.

You can get in touch with John Horgan by email at johnhorganmedia@gmail.com.