News

By Steve Plunkett

St. Joseph’s Episcopal School and its wealthy benefactor have lost their courtroom quest to reverse the decision by St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church not to renew their lease.

Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Bradley Harper, invoking the separation of church and state, dismissed the school’s lawsuit on Sept. 6.

“There’s no way for this court to adjudicate this matter based upon neutral principles of law,” Harper said. “I quite frankly don’t see any way around it. It would require judicial inquiry into internal church matters and constitutes a subject matter which this court, a secular court, lacks jurisdiction.”

Harper in February had denied the school’s request for an injunction to let it continue to operate on the church’s grounds until the lawsuit was resolved, ruling that the school did not have “a substantial likelihood of success … given the absence of any writing which establishes the existence of a 99-year lease agreement.”

School trustees subsequently notified the families of St. Joe’s 175 students that classes would not resume this school year. The last graduates are now freshmen, most at American

Heritage School in Delray Beach, St. John Paul II Academy in Boca Raton and Cardinal Newman High in West Palm Beach.

“We are all devastated over this and still can’t believe the Church is closing the school,” the school’s admissions director, Mary Aperavich, wrote on a Facebook post congratulating the rising ninth-graders.

St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church, which owns the property on which the school sat for 60 years, told the school in April 2022 that it would not renew its lease. The school tried to find a new location, “only to learn that extensive permitting and remodeling would prohibit the completion of any move for at least two years,” the trustees said.

In its lawsuit, the school claimed it had an oral, 99-year lease to stay where it is, at 3300B S. Seacrest Blvd., until 2093.

But the church’s attorney argued that under Episcopal rules, any encumbrance of property would have had to be approved in writing by the diocese and the bishop.

The church also said the school signed a five-year written lease in 2012 and was given a five-year extension that expired in November 2022. Both sides last year agreed to extend the lease until June 30, 2023, while the dispute headed to court.

The church has not given its reasons for not wanting to renew the $5-a-year lease.

The school’s 175 students were in pre-K through eighth grade. While the two entities share the St. Joseph’s name and the same location on Seacrest Boulevard, the school split off from the church in 1995.

That was a year after William Swaney, most recently president of the board of trustees, gave the church about $2.5 million worth of stock in his company, Perrigo, “for the express purpose of the church constructing buildings and facilities for use by the school,” said the school’s lawsuit.

Swaney, the suit claimed, made it clear to the church’s vestry that he was making the gift in exchange for a promise, made orally several times, that the school would never be displaced from the property. The church sold the stock and built a gymnasium, library, classrooms and administrative offices.