Here’s an update to our story on Friday about the sale of the former Eastvalley Elementary School site to the Roman Catholic Archiodecese of Atlanta:
Maureen Smith, a spokeswoman for the archdiocese, told East Cobb News on Monday that a church catering to the local Vietnamese community will be opening on the former Eastvalley site.
The Cobb County School District announced last week that it had sold the building and nearly 10 acres of property on Lower Roswell Road at Holt Road for $4.25 million.
Smith said the church will be named after Our Lady of Lavang, an apparition of the Virgin Mary that dates back to the late 1700s, when Catholics in Vietnam were suffering persecution. A basilica named Our Lady of Lavang was dedicated in the village of La Vang, near Hue in central Vietnam, in 1962.
This will be the third Vietnamese church in the Atlanta area run by the archdiocese, joining Our Lady of Vietnam in Riverdale and Holy Vietnamese Martyrs in Norcross.
The former Eastvalley site has been closed since 2023, when the new school campus opened on Holt Road, across from Wheeler High School.
The building opened in the early 1960s and includes 50,000 square feet of space.
Smith said that “there are no plans for major renovations or construction at this time. The church hopes to use the facility as-is for now.”
She didn’t have specific timeline for when the church would open, but said that “it will take some time to finish all the contracts and paperwork before we can start using it.”
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