The Rev. Robert Sullivan has a long history with John Carroll Catholic High School.

Like most of his family members, Sullivan went to school there, graduating in 1982. He taught there for four years in the mid-1990s.

This summer, he will take over as the school’s president, replacing the Rev.  John McDonald, who is leaving Birmingham to become the Chair of Homiletics at the Pontifical North American College in Rome.

Rev. Robert Sullivan is John Carroll Catholic’s new president from Alabama NewsCenter on Vimeo.

“One of the positives I have is that I’m a graduate of the school. I have a tie to the alumni,” Sullivan said.

As president, Sullivan – who is known among his parishioners and friends as “Father Bob” – will be the “public face” of the school, engaging alumni and other groups in fundraising efforts to help offset the cost of tuition.

One of his priorities as president will be increasing enrollment. When he went to school at John Carroll, enrollment was more than 1,000 students. Today, the school has just over 600 students.

To be fair, the current school wasn’t built to accommodate 1,000 students, but Sullivan said he would like to increase enrollment to somewhere between 600 and 1,000.

“I want to continue to build on the things Father John McDonald has done, and also to increase enrollment and allow John Carroll to continue to grow and be that beacon that it has always been in Birmingham,” Sullivan said.

Sullivan, 51, is pastor of St. Francis Xavier Church in Birmingham and will continue in that role when he takes over as president of JCCHS on June 1.

A 1986 graduate of Auburn University in business administration, Sullivan worked two years in the private sector before becoming a priest.

In 1988, he entered the seminary, spending his first year at the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri in Toronto, Canada. He then went to Mount Saint Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, Md., where he received a master’s degree in divinity and another master’s in theology in 1993. He has been assigned to churches around Alabama, and oversaw Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic Elementary School and High School while he was pastor of Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic Church in Anniston.

He has been pastor of Saint Francis Xavier Parish in Birmingham since 2007, and also oversees the elementary school.

Sullivan is no stranger to education and said he looks forward to taking on his new role at the high school. His first order of business as president will be to build relationships with the Catholic grade schools, which feed into John Carroll Catholic High School, in hopes of increasing enrollment. He said he hasn’t yet met with any of the school’s leaders and won’t until he officially takes over as president.

“Father John McDonald has done a good job as president and I look forward to picking up on what he has done and continuing to move it forward,” he said. “John Carroll, academically and spiritually, is still a very high caliber school and I want to maintain that and grow it.”