Blessed are they who go to Catholic schools: finances force schools to close down - Catholic Education - Cover Story

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 29, 1993 by Tim Unsworth

Finances force many schools to close down

CHICAGO - "Help our school," she pleaded. "Buy a candy bar."

In her white blouse and Black Watch skirt with white sox and neat shoes, she was cute as a bug's ear and as Catholic as the pope's beanie. No other faith is stronger than the one that puts its kids on street corners in a city with a high crime rate and nut level. Few other sights bring me back more to my Depression days at St. Alice's when we sold chances on turkeys bigger than our kitchen ovens in order to keep our school going.

The little girl was from a school I thought had closed. It is one of 309 surviving elementary schools in the Chicago archdiocese, a system that, including public schools, was once the third largest in the United States. More than 100 are located in economically depressed areas. At least that number are in serious financial trouble.

In 1965, there were 289,000 students in Chicago's Catholic elementary schools; by 1992-1993 it had dropped to 110,000 - a 62 percent decline. The 3- to 14-year-old population in the area has dropped by 9 percent, partly through mobility, perhaps partly due to birth control now practiced as much by Catholics as any other population.

Of all children baptized in Chicago, only 55 percent attend Catholic school or participate in a religious education program. Now there are 91,000 in elementary schools. The schools continue to merge or close. All the candy bars in the world can't seem to save them.

Our Lady of Mount Carmel Academy has been on Chicago's north side since 1888, two years after the parish was founded and a year before the then town of Lake became part of Chicago. Above the lintels on the epistle and gospel sides of the school, carved stones read "Boys" and "Girls" - relics of the days when girls and boys were separated after primary grades.

East of the school is a handsome house of prayer, the former convent that was once home to upward of two dozen Sisters of Mercy, who taught in schools like Mount Carmel for stipends as low as $30 per month. As with most other schools, there are no sisters at Mount Carmel. But, according to the principal, Sue Jungers, there is no shortage of applicants for teaching positions. The school has an excellent reputation.

(Chicago pay scales are better than in most dioceses, but still well below their public school counterparts. Teachers start at $17,900 and can reach $27,650 after 26 years. Principals start at $30,550 and can reach $47,975. There are addons of upward of $2,000 for master's degrees and doctorates. One high-ranking school official observed wryly: "Look, this is Chicago," suggesting that additional under-the-desk monies were sometimes available.)

Mount Carmel reflects the many changes that have taken place in Catholic elementary education in the past 25 years as well as the long-standing emotional pegs that mark the school as traditionally Catholic. Although many of its students can still walk to their parish school, as many as half do not live in the parish. Automobile and bus tires have erased parish lines just as they have for parish weddings.

Mount Carmel's 290 students, a number of whom are not Catholics, view the place as a kind of magnet school, pulling them in because of its innovative curriculum, multicultural program, extended day and computer sophistication. Enrollment is only half what it used to be. Classes of 45-60 kids are simply not tolerated anymore by the school office or the parents.

The once heavily Irish-American school now educates kids who represent 44 languages spoken at home. It is also integrated at a higher level than many public schools in Chicago. As with all schools visited for this report, a still powerful attraction is the religious curriculum and the traditional discipline, reported by one African-American Catholic seventh-grader as "uniforms, no jewelry, no lipstick or nail polish, no gum, no betting, no fighting, no nothin'."

And for good measure, "Use drugs or smoke and you're history." He added, "If the public schools got better, I might go back. But this school opens on time and closes on time. It does what it says it's gonna do." He was referring to the annual chaos in the public schools with threats of strikes, budget crises, layoffs and closings.

Another boy, a Filipino-American, said the $93 per week his family paid at a for-profit private school didn't buy as much education as he was receiving at Mount Carmel. A tall, bright black girl - one of the 15 percent of non-Catholics in the school system - commutes over 30 miles to Mount Carmel. "There are better teachers here. They take time out to help you," she said. She plans to attend Catholic high school.

Unlike the teachers and principals in the system, who are now hobbled by political correctness, the students were not reluctant to discuss their differences with the local public schools. They were remarkably aware of their better reading scores, safer environment and close relationships with their teachers. As this story was being prepared, the president of the Chicago Public School Board had just enrolled her daughter in a Catholic school.