Sister LaVerne King, a Religious Sister of Mercy who has been the principal of Christ the Teacher Catholic School in Newark since before its opening in 2002, will retire when the current school year ends in June.
Dialog Photo/Joseph P. Owens
She notified the diocesan superintendent of schools, Louis De Angelo, in mid-January.
She moved to Delaware to live with her aging mother, according to a 2018 Dialog article, and she saw an ad in the diocesan newspaper seeking a new principal for Christ the Teacher, which hadn’t even been named then.
“A goal of mine and Sister Rosalie’s is to prepare the people who are here for when we leave, because when we leave there’s not going to be a Mercy replacement,” she told The Dialog two years ago. Sister Rosalie Pronsati is the religion coordinator and works in the business office at Christ the Teacher. She has been at Christ the Teacher since 2006.
Sister LaVerne entered her religious congregation out of high school in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Her assignments included an eight-year stint in Peru. Most of her ministry has been in elementary education.
In a 2015 article in The Dialog, Sister LaVerne said there were five or six religious communities ministering at her high school, Bishop Egan in Levittown, Pa. The Mercy Sisters stood out.
“I just liked their charism,” she said. “They did a lot of service work, got us involved in service. And that was a blessing to me.”
De Angelo said information on the posting of the principal’s job at Christ the Teacher is forthcoming.
