The Burlingame Region sponsors two high schools for girls, which reflect the sisters' special concern for women.

Mercy High School Burlingame offers a challenging academic curriculum with a wide range of accelerated classes and a dynamic extracurricular program. Mercy also offers a Learning Assistance Program for a limited number of students. The school participates in a coed Tri School program with Notre Dame High School in Belmont and Serra High School in San Mateo. The beautiful Kohl Mansion, a popular event site, is part of the high school.

Mercy High School San Francisco is a fully accredited college preparatory school which offers programs to prepare young women for leadership roles in society. Along with academics the school stresses community service, religion classes, the arts and a full sports program.

Individual Sisters also teach in schools not sponsored by the Sisters of Mercy. They remain experts in elementary education and several teach at the university level.

"No work can be more productive or good to society than the careful education of women."
    --Catherine McAuley

Sister Cris Caballero has a ready laugh with a smile that warms her listening students. With the easy grace of a veteran, she influences a lively generation at St. Francis School in Bakersfield, founded by the Sisters of Mercy in 1910. She loves teaching religion to fifth graders, art to first through eighth graders and ancient civilizations to sixth grade. Her fifth graders are on the edge of the teen years. “Teaching religion is journeying with them, helping them figure out their changing emotions and growing bodies as they become aware of one another,” she said. “We talk about values and self-respect.”

What do the students from a relatively affluent area of the city teach her? “They teach me that there is a different kind of poverty–a poverty of the spirit, invisible, but just as needful as the economic kind. The cure for that poverty is giving. I am blessed to be in a justice-aware community. I focus on our charism of working with women, children and the poor. At the school we are involved in so many wonderful service projects. We’re getting the message across that there is need outside of their world.”