The Sacred heart Parish School (O'Neill Street) had rather a good start, since Ponsonby's next pastor was Osmund Egan O. S. B., the inspector of schools for the diocese, who was also pastor of Ponsonby from 1900 to 1906.

It was in Egan's time, in 1903, that Sacred Heart College opened its doors in Richmond Road on land donated for education by Hugh Coolahan way back in 1851.

It was under Egan's successor, Michael Edge, that the most significant move was made in all the history of the parish. He bought two acres of land in Vermont Street in 1908, with the idea that the parish church, school and presbytery could be transferred there in due course.

The first step came in 1913, when the new Sacred Heart parish school and the Marist Brothers' boys school were built on the property. The Marist Brothers' school was the primary department of the Pitt Street school, which had remained there when the secondary department moved to Sacred Heart College. There was no early anticipation of the building of the new church, as was shown when a two-storey building was erected behind the church in 1917, replacing the former presbytery, which had been on the other side of O'Neill Street. Incidentally, in the great influenza epidemic of 1918, the Vermont Street schools became emergency hospitals, with the Sisters of Mercy as nurses.

Fathers Cahill, Murphy, Carran, Wright, Mansficid and Brennan came and went as administrators; and then in 1928, when W.O'Doherty was in charge, a new school and convent made their appearance in the parish, in Trinity Street.

The school was a church school, whose uncomfortable desks could be changed into even more uncomfortable pews for Sunday Mass, with the partitions between the rooms folded back, and the sanctuary revealed in the same way. The Marist Sisters lived in a house in Trinity Street, with official entrance to the schoolyard by way of a path beside the convent (Kelmarna Avenue ended at Trinity Street in those days). The Marist Brothers' School, St Columba's, was an intermediate school, taking boys from Standard 3 to Standard 6. It boasted a seemingly invincible Rugby team, coached by Brother Calixtus Higgins, who died of a stroke in 1932.

The school hall was also used at this period by a Catholic Scout troop led by Norbert Casey. There was a two-storey house on the Vermont Street property, and this, in 1933, became the Home of Compassion. When the new home was opened in 1939 in Kelmarna Avenue, the Vermont Street house became the Mission House, often unkindly referred to as "the home for unmarried Fathers", since it housed a variety of specialist priests - Alfred Bennett, Reginald Delargey, John Mackey, Leo Downey and others.