Robert Lees, President, Tampa Catholic High School

August 2026 —Invest: spoke with Robert Lees, president of Tampa Catholic High School, about the school’s growth, the upcoming Bellini Center for the Arts, and the role of creativity in preparing students for the future. “Where tasks may be changed by AI, creativity will always be at a premium,” Lees said.

What key changes have had the biggest impact on Tampa Catholic High School over the past year?

We look at the school in two ways: the educational mission and the institutional mission. We have a president and principal model. Our principal is tasked with managing the educational mission of the school.

The biggest change for us is that we are in the process of building a $20 million center for the arts, which will come online in the fall. That will lead to a major shift in terms of our campus life, as well as curriculum adjustments, changes, and additions.

The Bellini Center for the Arts is named for an alumnus, donor, and someone who is very well connected in the Tampa area, Arnie Bellini, who is a graduate of Tampa Catholic and has been extremely philanthropic.

The concept behind the center is not just about a building, but about how it will transform our curriculum. As a tech entrepreneur, Bellini has spoken over the years about how the workforce is shifting with AI. In creating a world where students can be viable, the creative among us are going to be the ones who thrive. Where tasks may be changed by AI, creativity will always be at a premium.

The Center for the Arts is not designed only to train actors, actresses, musicians, and singers, although that would be great, and we are open to that. It is really to foster creativity in any walk of life. The center will provide the opportunity and the impetus for developing that as an adjunct to our normal curriculum. 

What trends are you seeing in private and college preparatory education?

We are seeing incredible growth and interest in our school, and in private-sector education more broadly. Florida is a school-choice state that has incentivized families to have a much greater say in the education of their children and to be able to target their tax money toward those options.

We have always been a very robust school in terms of enrollment. In my 10 years here, Tampa Catholic has always had optimal enrollment, but interest in the school has gone much higher than that. Some of that has to do with school choice, but not all of it. Families are looking for an education that aligns with their values. 

We are a Catholic school, and we are designed, optimally, to serve Catholic families. However, we are open to students of all faith denominations, so we have a core group of students who are not traditionally Catholic. Managing the interest and the mission in light of those changes has probably been the biggest trend on the institutional side.

What opportunities do you see to further strengthen Tampa Catholic’s academic offerings and student experience?

Anytime you experience interest in the school and growth in the school, it has the opportunity to be a double-edged sword. It can help you expand opportunities and programs, but it also creates internal dialogues and conversations about remaining true to who we are.

Our school has catered to the development of faith, excellence, and family. That is our motto and the place from which we operate. With increased growth, there are challenges. The easiest situation in the world would be to say that we are going to cater to those who can best fulfill our bottom line, but that is not our mission. Our mission is to be a Catholic school available to all.

Certainly, we can no longer serve all who have interest in our school, so those difficult conversations are paramount. We have prided ourselves on the idea that Tampa Catholic is almost the exact demographic of the United States when it comes to the split of male and female students, and the demographic split along racial lines, with an African American segment of our student body and a large Hispanic part of our student body.

Remaining true to the diversity of the community and trying to manage all of that in light of the interest is really a big thing. Continually striving for excellence in terms of the academic program, and attracting the best teachers who are mission-centered, is a big part of that growth as well.

With the Bellini Center for the Arts, we added roughly 60 or 70 more students and six or seven more staff members, so aligning all of that with who we are and our mission is important.

How does Tampa Catholic contribute to Tampa Bay’s long-term growth and help develop future leaders?

One of the great joys that I have as a person in leadership at this school is when graduates come back and give their testimonies. Even the youngest ones come back and say that when they went to college, it was so easy. I always tell them that it really was not easy. They were just prepared. They were prepared to be students, not just in terms of knowledge, but in terms of the work ethic that we tried to instill in them.

When you walk throughout the Tampa Bay region, you will find Tampa Catholic graduates everywhere. They are a loyal group of people, and I do not know that you will ever find a more loyal group. There is great pride in the school, even though our school historically is not as old as many of the other private and Catholic schools.

There is an intense pride among the graduates and intense success. We like to highlight our graduates, especially the best among us, and honor graduates as distinguished alumni from different walks of life. In all areas, we see with our alumni that they have made an impact in the Tampa area, in every walk of life. It is a big part of who we are, and it is a big source of pride among our students, our leadership, our school, and our alumni.

Looking ahead to the next few years, what are your key goals and priorities for the school?

From an institutional point of view, as a school that was founded in 1962, our priorities are to continue to revamp the physical plant of the school. We are well underway in terms of doing that. We have completed three major builds on this campus, and we continue to upgrade it.

We are trying to set Tampa Catholic up for the next 100 years, and that has to be done intentionally, over time, and with the generosity of our benefactors, alumni, and other philanthropists in the area.

From an educational point of view, we are navigating, as all schools are, a new world. We know that AI is going to have a dramatic effect on education, business, medicine, law, and everything else. We do not want to be the ones reacting to those things. We want to be the ones looking at that and saying, how do we implement this?

Our philosophy when it comes to technology, whether it was moving to a one-to-one iPad program in 2013 or looking at AI in the future, is that these are situations that are not going away. We cannot bury our heads in the sand and hope it all works out.

We have to adequately and aggressively embrace it, while also balancing that with tradition, traditional methods, and interactions with human beings. We have talked about different ways in which we can implement AI in a productive way, but we are embracing it in the sense that this is reality and something we cannot pretend does not exist. Looking forward, I think everyone in education is under the impression that AI is definitely going to be part of everything people are doing.