The number of Catholic schools in America has been decreasing lately, according to a report by the National Catholic Educational Association for the 2011-12 school year: 34 new schools opened, while 167 schools either consolidated or closed.
This trend has continued, uninterrupted since the 1960s, when Catholic schools, including those in Chicago, were at an all-time high, according to numbers from the National Center for Education Statistics, reported in the Chicago Tribune: In the early 1960s, there were close to 13,000 schools across the nation with about 5.3 million students. Except for a period of stabilization in the 1990s, both numbers have been falling ever since: There were 6,841 Catholic schools (5,636 elementary, 1,205 secondary) and 2,031,455 students (1,440,572 elementary/middle, 590,883 secondary) enrolled in those schools across the country during the 2011-12 school year.
In Chicago, enrollment in Catholic schools plunged from 344,000 in the 1960s to about 86,500 last year. Including the closing of St Scholastica High School, announced in March, there will be 255 Catholic schools in the Chicago Archdiocese. There were 526 in 1960.
Some Catholic schools across America are reinventing themselves, the New York Times reports. This is done in some cases to appeal to wealthier families who can afford the tuition, often more than $8,000 a year, and might provide financial support for the school even after their children leave.
A bit of reinvention is needed, of course, since in the 60s, families were closely tied to their parishes. When many people lived in Chicago during the time when construction was big, Catholic schools popped up left and right in the neighborhoods. But these schools are expensive to run, and if families flee to the suburbs, where more jobs exist today, it’s only a matter of time before Catholic schools can’t afford to keep their doors open to provide the education people want—unless they make a concerted effort to focus on the competition for students brought about not only from other Catholic schools but from public charter schools, other private schools, and even better and more equipped and accountable public schools.
In Chicago’s Austin neighborhood, the Tribune reports, for instance, St Angela School, threatened with closure in 2005, launched a series of marketing campaigns and doubled its enrollment. And on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, an entrepreneur who studied at Columbia University’s Teachers College, rebranded St Stephen of Hungary elementary/middle school to offer some of the extras more typical of private schools, such as iPads for sixth graders, extracurricular activities, violin lessons, and so on.
“Everything I was doing at Teachers College, I could do in the classroom,” that entrepreneur told the Times. She was comparing St Stephen to public schools, where she had taught before going private and said everyone had to teach from the same page. She’s “like a gem,” the Times quoted one parent of a student at St Stephen as saying. “When she’s done with all this not-for-profit stuff, I keep telling her she should come to Wall Street.”
Catholic schools have shown a consistent enrollment from non-Catholics through the years. In the 2011-12 school year, the non-Catholic enrollment nationwide was about 15.4 percent. However, at some schools that take a more Franciscan rather than papal approach, focusing on kindness more than religious edicts, non-Catholic enrollment is higher. At St Stephen of Hungary, for example, non-Catholic enrollment is about 30 percent, double the national average.
