Cistercian Preparatory School

```mediawiki Cistercian Preparatory School is a private, Catholic institution for boys located in Irving, Texas, on a campus shared with Our Lady of Dallas Abbey, a Cistercian monastery. Founded in 1962, the school serves students in grades 5 through 12, offering a rigorous academic curriculum rooted in the intellectual and spiritual traditions of the Cistercian Order. The school is staffed and directed by the monks of Our Lady of Dallas Abbey, making it one of a small number of monastic schools in the United States where members of a religious order teach alongside lay faculty. Its campus sits on approximately 45 acres in Irving, combining working monastic grounds with academic facilities, athletic fields, and a chapel that remains central to daily school life.

History

Cistercian Preparatory School was founded in 1962 by monks of the Cistercian Order of the Strict Observance, commonly known as Trappists, who established Our Lady of Dallas Abbey in Irving and opened the school as an extension of their monastic mission. The founders sought to create an institution where the Cistercian emphasis on contemplation, discipline, and learning could be applied to the formation of young men. The school's early years were shaped by this monastic vision, with monks serving as teachers, administrators, and spiritual directors from the outset.

The school has remained on its Irving campus since its founding, growing steadily in enrollment and facilities over the following decades. By the late twentieth century, Cistercian had established a strong reputation within the Dallas-Fort Worth Catholic school community, drawing students from across the region. Its unusual model — a boys' school run by a working monastery — distinguished it from other private Catholic institutions in the area.

The school has continued operating into the mid-2020s with active student life programs, including a Student Council whose president for the 2026–2027 school year was announced in the spring of 2026.

In 2026, Cistercian was among a number of prominent North Texas private schools that declined to participate in Texas's new school choice program, which provides state-funded education savings accounts to families. The school did not publicly comment on its reasons for not participating, consistent with the posture of several other selective independent and Catholic schools in the region that expressed concerns about potential regulatory entanglement or mission drift associated with accepting state funds.

Education

Cistercian Preparatory School offers a college-preparatory curriculum for boys in grades 5 through 12, structured around the classical Catholic tradition of rigorous academic formation combined with moral and spiritual development. Core subjects include mathematics, the natural sciences, literature, history, and theology. Latin is a required part of the curriculum in the middle school years, reflecting the school's commitment to classical education. Advanced courses and Advanced Placement offerings are available at the upper school level.

The school's educational philosophy draws directly from the Cistercian monastic tradition, which prizes intellectual discipline, silence, and the examined life. Monks of Our Lady of Dallas Abbey teach alongside lay faculty, and the presence of an active monastery on campus gives the school an environment unlike most private institutions. Students attend Mass regularly, and the spiritual calendar of the monastery shapes the rhythm of the school year.

The faculty's approach emphasizes depth over breadth — extended engagement with primary texts, careful writing, and the development of independent reasoning. Class sizes are kept small to allow direct dialogue between teachers and students. The school does not have a traditional competitive admissions marketing apparatus; it relies largely on word of mouth and its academic reputation within the Catholic community of the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Extracurricular life includes a range of sports at both the middle school and upper school levels, including football, as evidenced by an active middle school football program. The school also maintains student government, with the Student Council playing an active role in school life.

Campus and Architecture

The campus of Cistercian Preparatory School occupies roughly 45 acres in Irving, Texas, and is shared with Our Lady of Dallas Abbey. This arrangement is unusual in American Catholic education: students attend class and participate in activities on the same grounds where a community of monks lives, prays, and works according to the Rule of Saint Benedict. The physical proximity to an active monastery is intentional — it's part of the school's founding vision that students would be formed not only by formal instruction but by daily contact with a community living out the values the school seeks to instill.

The campus includes academic buildings, a gymnasium, outdoor athletic fields, and the Abbey church, which serves both the monastic community and the school. The landscape is notably open and relatively undeveloped compared to many suburban private school campuses, in keeping with the Cistercian tradition of simplicity and the monastic preference for natural surroundings conducive to contemplation.

Relationship with Our Lady of Dallas Abbey

Our Lady of Dallas Abbey is a Cistercian monastery founded in Irving in 1954, predating the school by several years. The monks who established the monastery founded Cistercian Preparatory School in 1962 as a direct expression of the Cistercian educational mission. The school remains under the governance of the Abbey, with the Abbot and the monastic community providing institutional oversight. This is a defining feature of the school's identity: it is not merely a Catholic school with a religious name, but an institution actively run by a monastic community whose members are present on campus every day.

The Abbey and school together form one of the more distinctive Catholic institutions in Texas. The monastic community's commitment to stability — a central Benedictine and Cistercian value — has given the school an unusual degree of institutional continuity over more than six decades.

Notable Alumni

Cistercian Preparatory School has produced graduates who have gone on to careers in law, medicine, business, academia, and public service, a reflection of the school's strong college-preparatory program. Because the school serves a relatively small number of students at any given time, its alumni network is tight-knit. Specific notable alumni and their accomplishments should be documented with reliable sources as they become publicly verifiable.

See Also

• Our Lady of Dallas Abbey
• Cistercian Order
• Catholic schools in Texas
• Irving, Texas

References

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