by Dan Masterton
Ok, I’m still thinking about this school closure. So are other folks around here – local news reports, social media activism, a yard sign campaign, and now a letter from the superintendent with explanations for the closing and a townhall at which he’ll be available planned for school families tonight.
One of the interesting threads of my conversations is the variety of structures out there for Catholic elementary school tuition.
This school that closed, and another we looked at in the next town over, have a base rate of tuition and then a lower rate for registered parishioners. The definition isn’t formally listed, but I believe it just means that you’re registered at a school-sponsoring parish.
Our old parish in the city had a base rate of tuition and then a lower rate for “active parishioners.” These families were distinguished by being registered at the parish, logging a minimum hours of volunteer time at the service of the parish, and giving consistently to the Sunday collection.
Our old suburban parish had a base rate of tuition and then a lower rate for baptized Catholic students. Rather than distinguishing committed parishioners from nominal ones, or parishioners from non-parishioners, this structure just discounted tuition for Catholic kiddos who submitted a baptism certificate with enrollment.
Perhaps most radical and profoundly evangelical is the Catholic Diocese of Wichita, Kansas. Years ago, the diocese made Catholic schools tuition-free for active parish families. The expectation was that parishes would collectively take on the burden of funding Catholic education, not just families with school-aged children. The parishes then use their collections to fund the schools more widely.
Looking at Catholic high schools specifically, many have robust financial aid programs that lean on endowments, large gifts, and alumni donors to help defray the rising costs of high school tuition. Even more significant, some schools, like Regis Jesuit in New York, cover tuition for all accepted and enrolled students. There’s also the prophetic financial and work-study model of Cristo Rey Network high schools and the emerging efforts stemming from Arrupe College’s two-year higher ed model in Chicago.
People are trying to be creative, constructing different structures with varying levels of success. One reason I infer for the relative strength of stability in our neighboring town with their elementary school is the multi-parish approach, by which five parishes subsidize the school, which is located on its own separate campus. Yet, our closed school was a two-parish school our parish has never had its own school and thus we’ve never had to merge down), and not even two feeder parishes both sending subsidies could keep it afloat; in fact, our partner parish was struggling to afford the subsidy within its own operations.
As a former campus minister, it was always difficult to find a balance, or even a connection, between the high schools where I worked and our local parishes. Often, there was some basic health in the feeder connection, like bringing middle school kids on campus for Catholic Schools Week Mass and shadow days, but the ties largely ended when their parish kids became students at the high school. The families’ parishes were largely an afterthought, if we knew them at all.
The future could be strengthened by stronger parish-school ties. We likely need to stop clinging to the one-to-one connection in which a single parish supports a namesake school (except maybe where it continues to work robustly, but maybe not even there) and look instead to pooling our communities more collaboratively.
The Diocese of Wichita offers a profound model for places where there is an appetite for massive, dynamic outreach and redesigned mission-forward ministry – another place where greater emphasis on mission-centered advancement, development, and marketing is likely much more valuable than narrow ministry offices. And the Church will likely have to reckon with a wider, deeper collective responsibility for Catholic education if we want it to have a future.
On a simpler basis, in a town like ours, now left with two parishes and no schools, we need to forge new ties with neighbors. It’s an invitation to look outside ourselves, beyond the historical status quo and a model that was weaker and more broken than we realized. It’s a chance to find new partners with whom we can try to start fresh and build more strongly. It’s also a place to start from prayer and discernment, so that cold calculations can be warmed by spirituality and hopeful optimism.
Sometimes, a clean slate, a rebrand, or a new start can reenergize a sleepy base. Based on the fits of activism in the past week, even if this is too little and too late, maybe there’s newly stirred energy that can be parlayed into what comes next. Hopefully this glass is half full.
Perhaps most radical and profoundly evangelical is the Catholic Diocese of Wichita, Kansas. Years ago, the diocese made Catholic schools tuition-free for active parish families. The expectation was that parishes would collectively take on the burden of funding Catholic education, not just families with school-aged children. The parishes then use their collections to fund the schools more widely.
Looking at Catholic high schools specifically, many have robust financial aid programs that lean on endowments, large gifts, and alumni donors to help defray the rising costs of high school tuition. Even more significant, some schools, like Regis Jesuit in New York, cover tuition for all accepted and enrolled students. There’s also the prophetic financial and work-study model of Cristo Rey Network high schools and the emerging efforts stemming from Arrupe College’s two-year higher ed model in Chicago.
People are trying to be creative, constructing different structures with varying levels of success. One reason I infer for the relative strength of stability in our neighboring town with their elementary school is the multi-parish approach, by which five parishes subsidize the school, which is located on its own separate campus. Yet, our closed school was a two-parish school our parish has never had its own school and thus we’ve never had to merge down), and not even two feeder parishes both sending subsidies could keep it afloat; in fact, our partner parish was struggling to afford the subsidy within its own operations.
As a former campus minister, it was always difficult to find a balance, or even a connection, between the high schools where I worked and our local parishes. Often, there was some basic health in the feeder connection, like bringing middle school kids on campus for Catholic Schools Week Mass and shadow days, but the ties largely ended when their parish kids became students at the high school. The families’ parishes were largely an afterthought, if we knew them at all.
The future could be strengthened by stronger parish-school ties. We likely need to stop clinging to the one-to-one connection in which a single parish supports a namesake school (except maybe where it continues to work robustly, but maybe not even there) and look instead to pooling our communities more collaboratively.
The Diocese of Wichita offers a profound model for places where there is an appetite for massive, dynamic outreach and redesigned mission-forward ministry – another place where greater emphasis on mission-centered advancement, development, and marketing is likely much more valuable than narrow ministry offices. And the Church will likely have to reckon with a wider, deeper collective responsibility for Catholic education if we want it to have a future.
On a simpler basis, in a town like ours, now left with two parishes and no schools, we need to forge new ties with neighbors. It’s an invitation to look outside ourselves, beyond the historical status quo and a model that was weaker and more broken than we realized. It’s a chance to find new partners with whom we can try to start fresh and build more strongly. It’s also a place to start from prayer and discernment, so that cold calculations can be warmed by spirituality and hopeful optimism.
Sometimes, a clean slate, a rebrand, or a new start can reenergize a sleepy base. Based on the fits of activism in the past week, even if this is too little and too late, maybe there’s newly stirred energy that can be parlayed into what comes next. Hopefully this glass is half full.
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