DePaul College Prep high school has acquired a 17-acre Roscoe Village campus for its new location, starting with the 2020-21 school year.

The co-ed Catholic high school said today that it bought the property at 3300 N. Campbell Ave. from Adtalem Global Education, the for-profit higher education company formerly known as DeVry Education Group. DePaul College Prep and Adtalem declined to say how much was paid for the property.

The high school plans to move from its current rented space at 3633 N. California Ave., which is just west of the North Branch of the Chicago River, to the new campus about a mile away and east of the river.

“With a steady increase in student enrollment every year since its inception in 2014, DePaul Prep looks forward to opening the new campus for the 2020-2021 academic year with an expected student population of 600 students and room for a continued increase in enrollment,” the school said in a statement.

The school, which has 500 students and about 75 faculty and staff, will have room to accommodate 1,000 students at the new location, President Mary Dempsey said in an interview. Faculty and staff will increase in tandem. She declined to say how much money it is seeking to raise for the new campus in a capital campaign that started last year.

Aside from the cost of the acquisition, the campaign will also cover the addition of a new turf field for soccer, lacrosse and football, and a new building with a pool, track and gymnasiums, she said.

While the new campus is already equipped with classrooms and science labs thanks to the former DeVry facilities, it will need other renovations to add a dining hall and chapel as well some facilities like lockers, she said.

There are a number of Catholic schools in Chicago, but fewer on the North Side. “There was a dearth of opportunities in this general North Side neighborhood,” Dempsey said.

That was one of the reasons that the school was founded, starting initially with about 325 students. The school now draws students from 51 ZIP codes, from Streeterville to the West Loop to Lincoln Square, she said.

With the increase of young families on the North Side, student demand has increased. In the area where the new DePaul College Prep campus will be, many of the schools are at or near capacity, Ald. Matt Martin said in a recent interview. His ward includes parts of the Roscoe Village, North Center and St. Ben’s neighborhoods near the new campus.

DePaul College Prep will leave behind a campus that formerly served as the facility for Gordon Tech High School and Archbishop Weber High School. That property is owned by the Catholic Congregation of the Resurrection, a community of Catholic priests and brothers.

Gene Szarek, provincial superior at the Congregation of the Resurrection, said his organization hasn’t decided yet what to do with the vacated property, though he suspects it will eventually be sold, though only for some “reasonable use,” he said. His group is conferring with its attorney, real estate broker and the alderman’s office on those plans and will decide sometime soon, but there is time in light of DePaul College Prep staying on the premises for another year, he noted.

Regardless of what happens to that part of the property, the headquarters for his organization and its chapel will remain on the other part of the property, he said.

The Irving Park neighborhood where that property is located is in the ward of Ald. Rossana Rodriguez. Her chief of staff, Chris Poulos, said in a recent interview that the property, with its proximity to the river, might be attractive to developers, but that Rodriguez’s office was putting together a community-driven zoning plan for the ward that would make sure there was a commitment to affordable housing. Her office has also mulled the idea that the property would be well suited to a community center with social services, he said.

DePaul College Prep is affiliated with DePaul University, the largest Catholic university in the country, and Dempsey said that relationship will continue and is likely to expand.

This story has been updated to correct the distance between DePaul College Prep's current and future campuses to about a mile, not less than a quarter-mile. It also now states the correct neighborhood of the property.