JAMAICA ESTATES — The sisterhood at The Mary Louis Academy will be welcoming a new group of “little sisters” come September.

The all-girls Catholic high school is set to open a middle school for sixth, seventh, and eighth graders for the start of the 2025-2026 school year.

The new school, The Mary Louis Academy Middle School, will hold classes in the former convent on the high school’s Jamaica Estates hilltop campus, which was the original site for The Mary Louis Academy (TMLA) when the Sisters of St. Joseph of Brentwood established it in 1936.

The projected enrollment for the middle school is 75 students — 25 in each of the three grades. Officials announced plans for the new middle school in December, and there has already “been a lot of interest,” according to President Livia Angiolillo, who anticipates there will be a waiting list to enroll as word of the middle school gets out. As of now, there is no deadline for applications.

TMLA, the only all-girls Catholic high school in Queens, has a current enrollment of 421 students. Because the middle school students will be part of the TMLA family, officials say it will allow the girls to make a smooth transition into the high school. Angiolillo said that the new middle school also has administrators rethinking their approach to the TMLA experience.

“Now we’re really thinking about it as … that continuum from middle school to high school to college,” she said. “[We’re] really beginning to think about how are we best preparing young women at the age of 10 and bringing them all the way through college into their professional lives and careers.”

“That’s always been our mission,” Angiolillo noted. Even though the high school and middle school will be housed in separate buildings, the students at each will interact, including through a mentorship program in which the high schoolers will serve as big sisters to their younger compatriots.

The new middle school is the second to open on a high school campus in the Diocese of Brooklyn in two years. In September of 2024, a middle school opened at Fontbonne Hall Academy, an all-girls high school in Bay Ridge.

TMLA plans to hire an assistant principal to run the new school, as well as two STEM teachers, two humanities teachers, and an electives teacher.

To help the girls forge their own identities, TMLA will offer the new middle school students a chance to select their own school mascot, which will be recognized alongside the high school’s penguin mascot. The new school will also have its own volleyball and basketball teams.

Academically, the middle school girls will be given the chance to get ahead of their high school studies by taking New York State Regents exams in three subject areas — U.S. history, Earth science, and Algebra I. Students who continue their studies at TMLA after graduating from its middle school will not be required to take the Test For Admission into Catholic High School, the standard entrance exam for Catholic high schools, officials added.

Current TMLA students are excited about the younger girls sharing their campus. Freshman Elizabeth Frandy, who talked about the “really strong sense of sisterhood” at TMLA, is looking forward to having her real-life sister Charlotte attend the new school as a seventh grader in September.

“I’m really excited for her to come here,” Elizabeth said, adding that Charlotte had been planning to attend a public middle school but changed her mind as soon as she heard about TMLA’s middle school. Her advice for Charlotte and other newcomers would be to “just enjoy yourself while you’re here.”

“It’s a really great experience,” she said.

The opening of the middle school will be a big moment for Elizabeth McGlinchey, TMLA’s acting director of advancement, who is also a 2003 graduate. Her daughter, Amber Whalen, will be a sixth grader at TMLA Middle School in the fall. “My daughter is incredibly invested in the idea of being a part of the first class that goes all the way through from sixth to 12th grade,” McGlinchey said. “And I truly believe that she’s going to flourish and blossom in an all-girls school environment, and with the curriculum that we’re going to have in place within middle school.”

Amber said she was excited. “I can’t wait to meet my new friends,” she said, adding that she is particularly looking forward to the school’s performing arts club, Genesians, because she wants to work on the backstage crew for school shows. She has already counted the number of productions she hopes to be working on in her upcoming seven years at TMLA. “They do two shows a year,” Amber said. “That’s 14 shows!”