The three schools in Maryland are unaffected by the closure of the DC tuition voucher program. I’m at least somewhat familiar with all three.
All three are victims, at least in part, of the current economic climate. A lot of folks are out of work, and a fast way to repair the family budget is to get rid of that private school tuition payment. These elementary schools have tuition in the range of $5,000 per year (give or take). If you have a couple of kids in the school, that’s a quick shot in the arm to the household budget of $800 - $1000 per month. That was easy!
Enrollment is down everywhere for our Catholic schools. Part of it is a long-term trend, but part of it is the recession.
The Catholic high school that my son attends typically has about 270 open spots per year and typically over 700 applicants for those spots. Those 700 annual applicants had grown steadily over the years and been stable for some years. Last year, they enrolled a few more than 260 students out of a pool of around 550 applicants. A 20+% drop in applications in one year after years of stable applicant numbers.
The school is still able to fill all its seats, and isn’t providing much more financial aid than in past years. But this past year, it’s certainly true that some kids who wouldn’t have been able to make it, academically, in years past were admitted. And some kids who would have been near or at the top of their class academically whou would have come in years past didn’t come this past year. This makes it difficult to sustain the top-level academic programs of the high school.
My wife is friends with some of the teachers at the Catholic elementary school to which my parish belongs, and is one of the principal feeders to my son’s high school. In years past, around 75% - 80% of the young men in 8th grade had applied to my son’s high school. This year and last, it was closer to 50%. The balance applied to the local magnet high school (which has a pretty decent science and math magnet academic program for the brighter kids who get in).
Regarding the specific schools cited in the article, I’m unfamiliar with Holy Redeemer in Washington, DC.
St. Hugh in Greenbelt has always been a bit of a shoe-string affair, one nasty economic cold away from being out of business. But academically, it has been a strong school providing very good academics and religious education to the middle-income communities in the Greenbelt area. It’s a very sad loss.
I’m a little bit familiar with St. Camilla’s. Good school. In years past, St. Mark’s had been a pretty good school, but has been struggling for the better part of a decade or so because of an indifferent pastor. Someone told me recently that they’d had something like five or six principals in six or seven years, or something like that. Ugh. The new pastor and the new principal (I think they came in about two years ago) tried to turn things around and were getting some traction, but the recession hit them hard, and well, the school is no longer viable. The school compares favorably on academics with the public schools nearby.
Other local Catholic schools are hurting, too. St. Pius X in Bowie, MD has seen enrollment decline by 25% or 30% in the last few years (although the school had expected some decline due to the end of the baby-boomlet of the early 1990s) and is reducing from three classes per grade to two classes per grade. St. Jerome’s in Hyattsville, MD is struggling, although recent reports of the school’s demise were certainly premature. Their strength is an astonishingly good pastor and principal who will likely guide the school through these trying times.
These are all Maryland schools, almost all in Prince George’s County, where the public schools mostly suck. These folks aren’t the beneficiaries of the DC voucher program. Their declining enrollment has been going on for years, and the current economic troubles have only given a bit more of a push down the hill.
As a graduate of the Catholic schools of the Archdiocese of Washington, it saddens me to see that our schools are in trouble for the long-term.
It’s time the Catholic Bishops join forces with rank-and-file parents and demand school choice otherwise as you post confirms the writing is on the wall.