By: Melody Simmons

A new library. Suites for college counseling sessions. Updated classrooms. High-tech laboratory space for science studies. These are among the academic pluses awaiting students at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in Fells Point as part of a $7.4 million renovation to be unveiled Tuesday night.

The school, a coed college-prep academy for low-income city students sponsored by the Maryland Jesuits, has an enrollment of 320 who pay tuition ranging between $550 and $2,500 based on family income. Cristo Rey has grown since first opening in 2007 with 121 students in 9th grade only, said Mary Beth Lennon, a spokeswoman.

The upgrades were funded by private donations, including a $1.2 million gift from the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation, the largest capital gift to a Catholic school from the foundation. Other gifts for the renovations include $500,000 each from Mary Catherine Bunting and the Charles T. Bauer Foundation.

Monday night, Bishop Denis Madden will be joined by the Archbishop of Baltimore Edwin F. O’Brien and Cristo Rey’s Principal Tom Malone to officially open the renovated buildings, formerly a convent and the K-8 Holy Rosary parish school, at Eastern Avenue and Chester Street.

Cristo Rey students participate in a unique corporate internship program that sends them in teams of four to dozens of local businesses and nonprofit organizations to gain skills and academic strength. In return, the school receives payments of $25,000 per team to the school. Those payments help the school to operate and underwrite its curriculum, administration and teaching staff, Lennon said.