Sacred Heart School in St. Tammany Parish began as an 80-student, two-room school, but quickly grew to 240 students in the first through 9th grades after a group of Black nuns crossed Lake Pontchartrain in 1958 to teach there.
As the only Black Catholic school in the eastern part of the parish, just outside of Slidell, Sacred Heart moved to a new building in 1961 and changed its name to St. Linus Elementary.
“The Sisters, upon their arrival to Bayou Liberty, made a huge, positive change to the people of color in our community,” Sheryl Jackson, a former student, said in a 2018 Times-Picayune article…