AURORA | Regis Jesuit High School in Aurora will have a new leader next school year with a background in philosophy and history.
The Rev. Paul G. Sheridan will take the helm of the school July 1 from the Rev. Philip G. Steele, who has been at the private Catholic high school since 2006.
Sheridan, 71, comes to Regis Jesuit from Bellarmine College Prep, a Jesuit all-boys high school in San Jose, California, where he has served as president since 2005, the school said in a statement.
ohn F. Sheridan, chairman of the school’s board of trustees, announced the hiring Nov. 12 after the trustees voted unanimously to hire Rev. Sheridan. The two men are not related.
The Very Rev. Ronald Mercier, Provincial of the U.S. Central and Southern Province of the Society of Jesus, who signed off on the hiring, said Sheridan was a good fit for the school.
“Sheridan, a member of this Province, has a long history of leadership in education,” he wrote in a statement announcing Sheridan’s hiring.
Charisse Broderick-King, a spokeswoman for the school, said the search for a new president started in June and included candidates from all over the country. Steele doesn’t plan to retire, Broderick-King said, but he will likely take a sabbatical as he considers what to do next.
According to the statement, before taking over the school in San Jose, Sheridan was president of St. Louis University High School for eight and a half years. While at SLUH, he helped to found Loyola Academy, a Jesuit middle school for boys that follows the Jesuits’ Nativity School model, the school said.
Before that, he founded Boys Hope Girls Hope in St. Louis in 1977 and oversaw it until 1995. Under his leadership, the program grew to include 17 homes around the country and in Latin America, including two homes just down the street from Regis Jesuit High School, the school said.
He holds a masters of divinity from Weston School of Theology in Cambridge, Mass., as well as a masters degree in history from Saint Louis University and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and letters from Fordham University, the school said. He was ordained a Jesuit priest in 1975.