For nearly 150 years, what is now St. Thomas Aquinas Academy has been providing a Catholic education to the residents of Marinette, a small northern Wisconsin city on the shore of Lake Michigan.
About 160 students now attend what board chairwoman Cheryl Sporie describes as a “very small, family-oriented parochial school.”
But for a couple of decades the academy has been bifurcated: While the main school building that houses the high school and middle school is in the heart of Marinette, near the mouth of the Menominee River, the smaller elementary school is in Peshtigo, a small town eight miles to the …