For decades, many parents of children attending Butler Catholic have wished that the school offered instruction beyond eighth grade.

Over the years, thousands of students have left Butler Catholic after eighth grade and enrolled in classes in the Butler School District or other public schools. While that has worked well for many students, a Catholic high school in the county would give parents and students the option to continue their private school education.

Last week, a groundbreaking ceremony marked the most visible step toward the construction of a new Catholic school, Cardinal Wuerl North Catholic High School in Cranberry Township.

The new school, which is expected to cost $70 million, will be built on a 71-acre site on the north side of Route 228, at Mars Crider Road.

Foundation work for the school is scheduled to begin in August and the two-story, 180,000 square-foot building is expected to be completed early in 2014.

Robert Paserba, superintendent of schools for the Diocese of Pittsburgh, said the high school is expected to have about 250 students per grade, or a total population of 1,000 students.

The new school in Cranberry Township will replace the current North Catholic High School in the Troy Hill area of the North Side neighborhood of Pittsburgh. About 250 students are enrolled in the current North Catholic, down from the peak of 1,200 in the 1960s, before the decline of the steel industry in the Pittsburgh area and the resulting population exodus.

Over the past five decades, a significant number of city residents have migrated to the suburbs, including the North Hills and, more recently, Cranberry Township as well as other parts of southern Butler County.

A number of the students now attending North Catholic are from those communities, so the Cranberry Township location will serve those families better than the city location. And by moving to southern Butler County, the new North Catholic high school will also be able to draw from the 2,700 eighth grade students attending public schools in the area.

Paserba, a Center Township resident and former superintendent of the Butler School District, said feeder schools in the area of the new North Catholic have population of about 3,200. Catholic schools also have a well established reputation for academics.

For those reasons, the new school should have little trouble filling its classrooms.

The completion of the school will be welcome news for parents and students from southern and central Butler County looking for an alternative to public high schools. The target audience will be students graduating from Butler Catholic at eighth grade as well as students who have not previously enrolled in a Catholic school, but are attracted to the private or religious school environment for their high school years.

Last weekend’s groundbreaking ceremony and the soon-to-begin excavation work represent a welcome shot of reality in the long-held dream of having a Catholic high school in Butler County.