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

"We're a family," a remarkably articulate eighth-grader, Katie Notter, said. "We're small. We learn more. There's discipline here." Katie could have spoken for all the schools.

Not far away, St. Michael's in Orland Park has one of the largest parish elementary schools in the archdiocese. There are 790 kids, 106 in fourth grade alone. There is no preschool or daycare, but a local private center buses kids to and from the parish school while the two working-parent families struggle to support children in houses that are too expensive with two cars and rising taxes.

St. Michael's has 17,000 parishioners from 4,500 families. The parish is well-off financially and able to subsidize the $1,145 tuition. (It's $1,665 for non-parishioners, which doesn't seem to stop parents. There are 126 children from outside the parish. The difference suggests a subsidy of nearly $350,000 from the collections, a figure that could drop if "downtown" needs more taxes.)

The local public schools are good. Yet, a sizable core of parents still prefer to send their kids to St. Michael's and to Catholic high school. "This is the South Side," a school official said. "The people are parochial school-minded."

There is no waiting list at St. Michael's. It seems to operate on the old principle of always room for one more.

Founded in 1867 by a group of Luxembourg farmers, the parish has given some of its best ribs to form new parishes. The school had a single teacher and only 30 students as recently as 1920. By 1961, however, it enrolled 830 students under the tutelage of 11 sisters and 7 lay teachers.

The loss of the sisters and the requirement for additional staffing to meet state guidelines is another factor in the growing dilemma facing Catholic education. In an effort to be as "public as the publics" and as "Catholic as the Catholics," the schools have added enormously to their expenses. St Michael's now has 35 teachers, 10 teacher aides, two health aides and an administrative staff to educate 40 fewer children than it did 30 years ago. The only Dominican sister remains in the library.

Perhaps the system would have lived longer if it followed the example of the tradition-bound synagogue schools that still give their backing to state educational bureaucracies. It reminds one of the late University of Chicago's president, Robert Maynard Hutchins'observation: "The worst fault of the Catholic schools is that they imitate the worst faults of the public schools."

Nationwide statistics echo those of Chicago. In 1968, there were 10,757 elementary schools with a total enrollment of 4,165,504 students, an average of 387 children in each school. By 1993, there were 3,411 fewer schools. Enrollment had dropped to 2,007,299, a loss of more than 51 percent. Elementary Confraternity of Christian Doctrine enrollment dropped only 13 percent during that period - from 3,856,000 to 3,339,000.

It isn't that there are fewer Catholics. The number of RCs has increased by over 22 million in the 25-year period. The figures suggest that, nationally, only 25 percent of Catholic children are receiving some form of Catholic education.