Our Mission & History
Our Mission: Nativity Preparatory School is an accredited, tuition-free, Jesuit middle school serving boys of all faiths from underserved families residing in Boston. Staffed by experienced teachers and dedicated volunteers who work closely with families, the school prepares students for success in high school and college. Nativity’s academically challenging and highly structured environment helps students grow in a love for learning and an abiding sense of responsibility to their community. In the Jesuit tradition, the school promotes the intellectual, spiritual, social, and physical growth that inspires boys from Boston to become men for others.
Our History
Storied Past
Founded by former Boston City Counselor Barry T. Hynes in 1990, Nativity Prep is the oldest and the longest operating “Nativity model” school in the nation: Jesuit middle schools explicitly focused on providing a highly structured, tuition-free, “preparatory” education to students from low-income families. Visionary leaders like Raymond Callahan SJ and John Wronski, SJ oversaw the school’s growth, including the move to a larger school building in Jamaica Plain, the transition from a volunteer to professional teaching staff, and the creation of a Graduate Support Office.
Exciting Present
After 33 years of providing Boston families from under-resourced communities with a full scholarship, and rigorous and character-forming educational opportunities, Nativity Prep is well known and respected in the city. Nearly 55 young men in 5th – 8th grade learn, grow, serve and pray at the school each day, guided and supported by a professional faculty, dozens of skilled volunteers, and hundreds of committed benefactors. The school’s 419 alumni are currently studying at the area’s best independent high schools and colleges and universities, working in a vast range of career fields and industries, and contributing to their neighborhoods through civil and community service.
Promising Future
Nativity Prep students receive an academically rigorous education, engage in a variety of formational co-curricular and extra-curricular opportunities, and graduate from high school and college at greater statistical rates than their peer set. Yet the Jesuit value of Magis calls us to “go deeper”, to serve our students, families, and alumni even better. Keeping the academic curriculum cutting edge, increasing the access and integration of new learning technologies, investing in new and deepened Graduate Support programming, and building partnerships with expert community organizations are all ongoing priorities in shaping the Nativity of tomorrow.