St. Catharine Academy is set to honor a Bronx family who has devoted much of their time to the high school.
The Rosso family will be inducted into St. Catharine’s Hall of Fame at an awards ceremony on Saturday, April 2. All of the women of the Morris Park family graduated from the school, including Lisa in 1978, and her daughters Christina in 2001, Jennifer in 2002, Melissa in 2005 and Alessandra in 2010.
After graduating, Jennifer, Melissa and Alessandra all coached volleyball at the school and helped lead the team to a state championship. Their parents, Lisa and Larry, have been helping with fundraisers, parent clubs and videotaping sporting events over a 13 year stretch when their daughters attended St. Catharine’s. The whole family was delighted to hear that they would be inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame.
“The Hall of Fame honor was definitely unexpected, especially to have the whole family inducted,” Larry Rosso said. “All of my children picked the same high school and were senior athletes of the year at St. Catharine Academy. We had a 13 year run at the school. I guess that is a long stretch for parents to be at a school. We still go back to keep score at games and cheer on the teams.”
Christina said that the school has become even better in the ten years since she graduated. To this day, she feels as if she never left.
“The things that have happened at St. Catharine in the last ten years are really great,” she said. “We got a new principal, and we are excelling in soccer and volleyball. The school has a smaller and more selectstudent body.”
The fact that St. Catharine’s is in walking distance from the family’s home helped to convince Lisa Rosso on sending her daughters to her alma mater. All of the girls attended St. Catharine’s on scholarship. After graduating, they were also able to attend college on scholarship, with Christina attending Manhattanville College and Jennifer, Melissa and Alessandra choosing Manhattan College.
Alessandra is currently attending college, while two of the daughters are currently holding jobs in finance and the other daughter in engineering. The sports program at the school, which the Rosso family helped to put on the map first as student athletes and then later as volleyball coaches, was something that taught them to be well-rounded adults.
“They would not have been the same children had they not played sports at St. Catharine,” Lisa Rosso said. “They really learned to manage their time and made a lot of friends on the teams.”
Lisa believes that the school has maintained its high standards in terms of its code of conduct since she had attended. She said that St. Catherine Academy was the only school she and her children every seriously considered attending, in part because of the discipline.
The family will be inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame, along with a 32-year Math Department veteran teacher David Antinore, at a formal ceremony at Beckwith Pointe in New Rochelle. For more information, call (718) 882-2882.
