Posted on 10/11/2004 5:42:20 AM PDT by sidewalk
May 26 was a day of tears and heartache as classes ended for the last time at three Mobile area Catholic elementary schools: Holy Family, Our Lady of Lourdes and St. James Major.
Children and teachers at Lourdes, near Dog River, buried bits of their 45-year-old school's heritage -- young pupils' written remembrances, a prayer card, a smiley face, a crucifix, a bandana -- in a glass-jar time capsule.
The burial may represent the flagging health of many Roman Catholic schools. Rising tuition, migration to the suburbs and decreasing desires for parochial schooling among Catholic parents have been working against Catholic elementary schools for decades, both in Mobile and nationwide.
Across the country, there are fewer Catholic schools each year, and student numbers, after growing during the 1990s, have resumed declines that characterized the last 40 years.
Locally, some schools, including Little Flower in Midtown and St. Vincent de Paul in Tillman's Corner, are in danger of closing, even though their leaders say they're determined to survive. Enrollment rose at both schools this fall, but they may not yet be in the clear.
Recoveries do happen: St. Mary in Midtown and Most Pure Heart of Mary downtown seemed marked for death in recent years but now are much stronger.
In 1996, Catholic elementary schools in Mobile and Baldwin counties counted 4,667 pupils, the most since 1988. Total enrollments hovered close to that level through the 1999-2000 school year.
Since then, the annual decreases have been large and steady. By fall 2003, enrollment was more than 11 percent smaller than in 1999. This fall, the system again has lost 200 students, dipping to 3,913 elementary pupils in the metro area. That's a nearly 16 percent drop since 1999 and marked the first time in generations that total enrollment in Mobile and Baldwin counties has been below 4,000.
The story holds true in the other 26 southern Alabama counties that are part of the Catholic Archdiocese of Mobile.
"I think it will be a smaller system as economics continues to be an issue," said Gwen Byrd, school superintendent for the archdiocese for the last 21 years. She said she believes that the declines have been driven greatly by rising tuition and costs.
As events unfold, Catholics say, something important is being lost. The church's elementary schools have acted as nurseries for learning faith and citizenship for generations. Church schools educated children of German and Irish immigrants who streamed into Mobile in the 19th century. Chruch schools taught black children victimized by segregation and state-sanctioned neglect.
Catholic leaders say the church's system of schools is the best way to pass on the church's beliefs. They say Catholic children learn much more about their faith when immersed in it every school day than they would once a week at the Catholic equivalent of Sunday school.
"The Catholic school not only wants to educate the mind but to educate the heart," said John Staud, a University of Notre Dame professor who helps lead an effort to educate Catholic school teachers.
Catholic schools also have traditionally educated a large number of non-Catholics, especially in the black community. School leaders say Catholic schools provide excellent education for people of other doctrines and faiths, and research shows all graduates are more likely to vote and be involved in their community.
"Catholic schools are a great gift to the church but are also a great gift to the nation," said Brother Bob Bimonte, the head of the elementary education department of the National Catholic Educational Association.
The group, based in Washington, D.C., tracks Catholic school statistics, promotes good teaching and administration practices and lobbies for the schools. Mobile's Byrd is a director of NCEA.
All those students are also children that taxpayers don't have to pay to educate in public schools. In Mobile County, the 3,335 pupils in Catholic elementary schools in 2002-03 would have cost $18.98 million to educate in the county's public schools, based on an average of $5,692 being spent per public school student.
While enrollment numbers are down across the country, the Catholic school system maintains a substantial role in the education landscape. During the last academic year, there were 1.84 million children enrolled in the church's elementary schools, and another 641,000 in high schools.
But the drumbeat seems ominous. In the northern portion of the Archdiocese of Mobile, two Catholic elementary schools in Montgomery, serving largely black enrollments, have closed in the last 15 years.
Some big Eastern and Midwestern dioceses with 100-plus schools have closed more elementary schools in recent years than Mobile ever had.
The trend also may disproportionately harm black neighborhoods. Prichard's St. James was founded in 1912 to educate black students.
As a rule, individual churches and not the overall archdiocese are financially responsible for their elementary schools. That means that those serving poorer and smaller parishes can be the most vulnerable.
It would be easy to think that enrollment has fallen because of decreasing numbers of Catholic children. But in the Archdiocese of Mobile, that's not true.
According to archdiocesan baptism records, the number of grade-school-aged Catholic children rose 10 percent from the early 1980s to the early 1990s, then fell by about the same amount through 1998. Since 1998, the school-age population has been rising and is projected to go up through 2007.
Such numbers, viewed against the backdrop of slipping enrollment, make it clear that Catholic schools are serving a smaller and smaller share of the Catholic population.
In 1983, enrollment in Catholic elementary schools equaled 73 percent of the school-age population, predicted by baptisms in earlier years. Because some non-Catholics were part of that enrollment, the share of all Catholic children served was actually smaller. That market-share number rose for a while in the 1990s but fell to a historic low of 51.3 percent in the 2003-04 school year.
There are pockets of growth, especially in some parts of the South and West. But Bimonte noted that closures reflect the struggles facing most Catholic schools nationwide, even ones that stay open. "Closing a school is only the last measure," Bimonte said.
So why is this happening?
It's hard to answer with scientific certainty. The Rev. Ronald Nuzzi of the University of Notre Dame said a group of Catholic leaders gathered in Washington, D.C., this past summer to talk about creating a rigorous nationwide survey of the reasons that students leave Catholic schools. The leaders were alarmed by the 69,000-student drop in U.S. enrollment between 2002-03 and last year.
But theories about the reasons for the decline break down into three broad categories:
Families can't afford rising tuition costs.
Families have moved to suburbs, where there are few Catholic schools, leaving those in older areas to struggle.
The religious and social drives behind the once-strong desire to send children to Catholic schools have eased.
The biggest thing keeping students away, say many Catholic educators, is increasing tuition charges. Though aid is often available, many poor families may be scared off by the sticker price, and middle-class families may have to part with a sum close to a car payment every month.
In Catholic elementary schools in Mobile and Baldwin counties, tuition grew by an average of 60 percent between fall 1994 and fall 2004, and 39 percent during the last six years of that span. Over the decade, tuition charges grew more than twice as fast as inflation.
Local and national Catholic leaders say they are profoundly troubled by the possibility that only the affluent may be able to pay to attend church schools.
"Some people cannot afford Catholic education," said the Rev. William Skoneki, pastor at St. Dominic Church on Burma Road. He headed a committee that examined Mobile-area elementary schools last year.
Mary Catherine Faralli had three sons enrolled at Holy Family last year. They're at St. Pius X now, along with an older brother attending McGill-Toolen High School. Faralli says Catholic school tuition is "worth every penny" in exchange for the religious instruction, personal discipline and academic excellence.
But tuition is a sacrifice, Faralli said. Her family didn't take a vacation this summer, rarely goes out to dinner, and one of their cars is 14 years old.
The strains of tuition may be camouflaged during good economic times, when families can absorb increases. But in the Archdiocese of Mobile, notable enrollment decreases and multiple school closings have accompanied the last two rounds of economic trouble in Alabama, according to a Mobile Register analysis.
In Mobile and Baldwin counties, enrollment was steady in the late 1980s, then fell 10 percent between 1989 and 1992. During that four-year span, schools closed at St. Margaret in Bayou La Batre, St. Monica on Dauphin Island Parkway and St. Thomas the Apostle in Chickasaw.
When the economy perked up again in the early 1990s, enrollment in the Mobile area and across the entire archdiocese grew some and then was relatively stable through the 1999-2000 school year. Again, the economy softened, and again the end result was the closing of three Mobile County schools.
There's no definitive evidence linking enrollment and economics, but many who study Catholic schools say they sense a connection.
"Many schools, they're just getting by, year-to-year," said Notre Dame's Staud. "When bad times strike, there's no margin."
The elementary schools that survive this weeding-out are often those attached to larger, richer parishes. Their students tend to have relatively well-off parents.
This drift toward the upper class is more apparent at McGill-Toolen and other Catholic high schools, where tuition is higher than in elementary schools. It worries many who say the church has a mission to serve the poor and the working class.
"My fear for Catholic education is it becomes affluent, white, west Mobile private schools," said the Rev. David Carucci, pastor at Little Flower. "I'm not in the business of running a private school, and I don't want to be in the business of running a private school."
"Has Catholic education become a luxury item?" asked the Rev. Joseph O'Keefe, a Jesuit who is interim dean of Boston College's education school.
Declining enrollment is not just about money. It's also about two sociological revolutions in the American Catholic population since World War II -- a migration to the suburbs and the changed relationship Catholics have had with their church since the Second Vatican Council.
For many years, Catholics were heavily concentrated in cities. That's been true historically in the Archdiocese of Mobile, where the namesake city has long been home to the densest grouping of Catholics.
But Catholics, many of whom once were poor immigrants, began to leave in-town parishes, following the larger migration to the suburbs after World War II.
Some downtown parishes in Mobile began to dwindle as early as the 1940s. The current archbishop, Oscar Lipscomb, grew up in one of the earliest casualties: Beauregard Street's St. Patrick. That school closed in 1948, and Lipscomb was pastor when the church closed in 1972.
Population movement continues. It helped do in Holy Family, Our Lady of Lourdes and St. James Major, even though all but the last were created after World War II, archdiocesan officials have said. Catholic school officials have said that young Catholic families, like other young families, are drawn to areas where new homes are being built.
"Part of what's going on in those three communities is they just don't have any children anymore," Skoneki said.
At St. James, fewer than five children have been baptized annually in recent years. At Holy Family, baptisms of newborns have fallen from about 25 per year to about 10.
In 1884, American bishops decreed that most parishes should have a school and that American Catholics had to send their children to parish schools if they were available. At the time, some Protestants viewed Catholics as fundamentally un-American -- people who could never be true patriots as long as they obeyed a Roman pope.
Public schools, controlled by the Protestant majority, tended to feature readings from the Protestant King James version of the Bible. Catholic religious leaders promoted church schools in part to protect children from what they saw as enmity and harmful religious indoctrination.
"Catholic schools were really founded to Americanize immigrants in a way that would not Protestantize them," Staud said. "In a sense, they were insular devices."
Across the country and in other parts of Alabama, Catholic schools were never universally available, but they were in Mobile. Every parish that opened inside the Mobile city limits before 1970 had a school at one time, according to church records.
The Catholic school was part of a vast parallel structure of Catholic institutions, including hospitals, colleges and fraternal orders. But over time, bias against Catholics faded away in many quarters, reducing the need for the network.
The election of John F. Kennedy as president in 1960 symbolized the end of widespread anti-Catholic feeling in the United States, said James Youniss, a psychology professor at Catholic University of America who has edited two books on current Catholic school conditions.
Catholics began to come out of their shells, especially as they grew more affluent, Youniss said. Moving to the suburbs was part of joining the mainstream. "They could practice their religion, and they didn't have to hide their Catholicism anymore," he said.
Youniss said the church failed to build schools rapidly enough in many suburbs during the period after 1965. Instead of sending their children to schools in sometimes distant urban areas, some suburban Catholic parents chose other educational options.
Coupled with that movement was Vatican II, a meeting of church leaders during the period of 1962 to 1965 that produced a wave of reforms. Along with sweeping away the Latin Mass in the United States, Vatican II also produced an alteration in church culture, from teaching focused on rules and penalties to teaching more focused on inviting people to come to God.
As it applied to Catholic schools, that change meant church members were no longer expected to send their children to Catholic schools. Vatican II also produced widespread departures from religious orders and marked the beginning of climbing tuition.
"The notion of schools that people might or might not choose, where you would pay tuition to attend, is a relatively recent thing," O'Keefe said.
The decline in commitment to Catholic schools was made clear in 2000, when a Georgetown University research center polled Catholic parents as to whether they had ever sent their children to church schools. Each generation of parents was less likely to enroll their children. The poll found:
71 percent of Catholic parents born in 1924 or before sent their children.
64 percent of those born between 1925 and 1942 did.
42 percent of those born between 1943 and 1960 did.
21 percent of those born in 1961 or after did.
For that last group, there's still a chance that the percentage will rise, as many parents still have school-age children.
But the pattern seems clear.
"The more kids that aren't in the parish school, that makes it easier for the next generation not to send their kids to Catholic school," Hunt said.
Back at Holy Family, Our Lady of Lourdes and St. James, school buildings sit silent this fall. Faralli says it's hard for her to look at the Holy Family school building when she visits the adjoining church and says her children still point out their old classrooms.
Other Mobile-area schools are still alive, and some are even thriving. But the pressure clearly makes everyone worried.
"Every place has its own unique circumstances," Staud said. "But this is a national trend."
With so many liberal lay teachers and the handful of nuns and priests in the Catholic school system still being filled with "The Sprit of Vatican II", I do not intend to send any children I may have into a Catholic school from K-12, and if they want to go to a "Catholic" university, they can pay it themselves.
Ping.
Could it be because there is increasingly little difference between Catholic and public schools?
"Professional" teachers cut from the same cloth, coming out of the same left-wing indoctrination centers at our nations "schools of education" teach at both.
Most of the suburban parish schools are so liberal they don't deserve the label of Catholic - mainstream protestant maybe... A few of the inner city parish schools, in largely ethnic neighbors retain more of their Catholic identity.
I had to raise a stink just 2 weeks ago when my 13 yo son was subjected to speaches by candidates from the Green and Democrat parties, who were both pro-gay "marriage" and pro-death. Allegedly there was no Republican challenger for that particular office - how convienent.
Makes one wonder why bother paying out a couple hundred dollars a month when your child is subject indoctrination with the same leftist idealogy I can get in public schools.
Sticking a cruxifix over the door doesn't not a Catholic school make...
I know this is a late response, but I was running a search for another thead and found this. If the Alabama folks want to relocate to Jersey, our Catholic schools are thriving here. The city I work in, had to actually reopen a previously closed Catholic school, because enrollemt just became too high to house the kids in one building. I'm a Catholic school advoacte and am very sorry to hear instances like these are happening in the South.
Our Catholic school just finished off celebrating the CHRISTMAS holiday and the CHRISTMAS concert and were on CHRISTMAS break, none of this PC "Holiday break" nonsense. I don't expect the public schools to teach about Christ's bday (Heaven forbid) but it's to the point where some local public schools here are not even allowed to mention Santa Claus anymore. There's still a discernable difference and this is why I am willing to pay. In our classrooms, an adult walks in the room and we are automatically greeted with "Good morning Mrs So and So and God bless you." from the children. Show such manners in a public school, and the child will be sent to the principal's office for bringing their religion into the classroom.
I don't see any value in bringing in Santa Claus - largely a creation of Coca-Cola as a gimmick to secularize and commercialize Christmas.
Some public schools are dens of Satan, run by secular humanist socialists brainwashed by the evil one and political left using the John Dewey, secular-humanist, pagan, Columbia University style of teaching.
Sticking a crucifix over the door doesn't not a Catholic school make...
I actually chose to remove my child from Catholic school because what she was being exposed to was endangering her faith, even though it was far superior academically to public school. It is one thing for her to hear error in public school, to which I can explain, "they do not know any better, they have not been given the faith as you have", it is quite another to hear error from those who represent the Church. If I had to do it all over again I would homeschool, but I was not as informed then as I am now.
In my personal experience, in my area, I have found that most parents who choose Catholic school do so because they want private school. They like the discipline, structure and high academic standards, instruction in the faith is of little consequence. However, I do not deny the possibility of the existence of truly faithful Catholic schools. They just do not exist in my diocese.
So many things come to mind, I’ll list a few which are not in any particular order.
There is some truth to that, but then there are people who live in highly rated school districts who still choose to send their kids to Catholic school. I believe these are the areas with the more faithful schools.
Kjvail, our diocese (Philly) prohibits pro-abortion speakers in any of our parish facilities. Of course, there have been notorious exceptions - Fast Eddie Rendell was permitted by a very liberal pastor at a nearby parish before his last run. But I've got half a dozen stories of politicians who were run right out on their ears when they asked to speak at Catholic schools.
By and large our Philly Catholic schools are OK and devoid of liberal PC garbage. As a for instance, before the presidential election, our parish school held a mock election - abortion was one issue covered. George Bush won in a landslide - this in highly volatile Montgomery County which gave the US Congress Joe Hoeffel.
I really think an individual Catholic school is a reflection more of the parish and its pastor(conservative, liberal, etc. ) than anything else.
It's just the point that now yet another Christmas symbol is not allowed, kwim? In another area, Kwanzaa can be addressed "because it's not about religion." Christmas? No dice
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