For the first time in its 85-year history, St. Francis School in Manoa will have boys in its ninth grade when classes resume for the fall semester today.

Seventeen boys are in the freshman class, said Sister Joan of Arc Souza, head of the school. They're outnumbered by girls, 3 to 1.

Souza decided to start admitting boys to the school's kindergarten in 2006. The next year, boys were allowed into the sixth grade class. Last year, the seventh and eighth grades went co-ed.

St. Francis opened as a convent school in 1924.

The school, with pre-kindergarten to 12th-grade classes, has 415 students.