Maryknoll School kicked off its 80th year yesterday more than halfway toward its $16 million goal for a new building intended to unite Maryknoll's separate high school and elementary-grade campuses.

Three of the last remaining students from the Maryknoll class of 1937 joined a Mass presided over by Bishop Larry Silva yesterday marking the school's milestone.

But even as faculty, staff, students and Silva remembered Maryknoll's founding and its first day of instruction on Sept. 6, 1927, they also spoke of a future less than two years away that could include a new, two-story, multipurpose building that would house classrooms, an alumni center, trophies and a gym big enough to hold two basketball games simultaneously.

"We've missed having a gym ever since I went to school here," said Lucile Smith Mistysyn, 87, "the baby" of the seven remaining students out of 19 who graduated in 1937. "We need a facility that can bring our entire school together."

Over the years, Maryknoll athletes have played their "home" games and matches everywhere other than their own campus and had to practice in parks, the YMCA and anywhere else that would take them.

"We've been renting facilities all over the city and shuttling students back and forth," said Maryknoll President Michael Baker.

Plans for a nearly 50,000-square-foot building on the parking lot of the elementary campus will "provide us for the first time in the school's history with a home court," he said. "We've never had a home court at our school so that our homecoming is actually at our home facility."

Eighty years ago a group of nuns arrived on the ship City of Honolulu, including Maryknoll Sisters who four days later started the school.

What began with 170 students in a one-story, wooden building has since grown to two campuses that today hold 838 pre-kindergarten through eighth-graders on Dole Street and 566 high school students on Punahou Street.

But yesterday, only 100 students representing each grade could fit into the chapel on the elementary-grade campus to hear Bishop Silva.

"It's very glaring that only a very small number of students could attend," Baker said. "It underscores our need for a new building."

It's designed to house every Maryknoll student for special events, Baker said.

"At this point, the high school has never been with the grade-school students," Baker said. "The grade-school students have no idea that there's 580 cousins across the street."

Construction on the new building is expected to begin this year and take 14 months to complete, Baker said.

Javen Correia, an 18-year-old senior from Wai'anae, plays football and basketball and runs track at everybody else's schools other than Maryknoll, and envies the younger students who will get to use the new building.

"I wish I was still here to play in it," Correia said. "But I'll be back to support them."

His cousin, Maika Motas, an 18-year-old Maryknoll senior, said Maryknoll breeds that kind of loyalty.

"It's a little school," Motas said, "with a big heart."

Reach Dan Nakaso at dnakaso@honoluluadvertiser.com.