Catholic grade schools: save them.

What I remember best of my days as a student in Saint Andrew's grade school in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, in the 1970s is that life fit together. Every day, my four siblings and I left our home in suburban Philadelphia to attend our parish school, four blocks away. The parish was the geographic, psychological, and spiritual center of the neighborhood, and its school was full of children from families like ours - large Irish and Italian clans, first-generation suburban, white- and blue-collar breadwinners alike. Saint Andrew's was a precious part of the Catholic community that completed the circle of faith formation begun in our home and nourished by our neighborhood church. The great gift of my childhood was that the Catholic sensibility planted in me at the time had a wholeness, beauty, and meaning that would grow in later life.

I believe this Catholic sensibility grew in great measure out of the relationship the parish school had with the parish itself and with the neighborhood. Because the school was rooted in the life of a sacramental community in a particular place, this connectedness provided natural opportunities to reinforce the Catholic faith perspective. In chance encounters at the local supermarket or swim club, Saint Andrew's students could witness their faith affirmed in interaction with fellow students and parishioners. In worship, commerce, and recreation, the gospel, while not always lived out, lurked in these encounters, and we sometimes tripped into the grace these moments afforded.

The sacramental imagination - itself a gift of a Catholic upbringing - takes shape when the sacramental symbols draw their meaning from people's lived experience. Thus a school, church, and community steeped in the Catholic ethos offers the young child - by definition open, impressionable, and imaginative - the chance to experience Catholic theology married to the every day. Faith, learning, and play are situated in a community of believers who also happen to be neighbors. A child's ordinary encounters at school are more likely to be transforming and sacramental when they take shape in and through a faith community. The experience is multivalent, encompassing, and, as such, far different from the one-dimensional model provided through the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine (CCD) programs, or through home schooling and private academies.

Greater lights than I - Andrew Greeley and James Coleman, for example - have identified and studied part of this phenomenon at work in Catholic schools, using the sociological construct of "social capital." Though my childhood memories may be dismissed as impressionistic, anecdotal, and unreliable, it appears to be verifiable that Catholic schools provide something extra. In May of 1997, Greeley presented a research paper at a Catholic University of America conference on "The Future of Catholic Education" in which he contended that Catholics share stronger "community ties" than do Protestants, and that this "community ethos" is "but one aspect of the larger phenomenon of the 'sacramental' or 'liturgical' imagination." I would venture further that the parish school is uniquely equipped to foster not only social capital and the sacramental imagination, but faith formation itself.

This is not to suggest that parish schools are all idyllic, or that the best of them have no shortcomings. I remember some odd, clearly unhappy nuns, some flawed pedagogic tools (like the wooden pointer broken over my third-grade classmate's head), crowded classrooms, worn textbooks, no gym or cafeteria. Still, Saint Andrew's formed me in a Catholic faith and worldview which blesses me today as I make my way through the adult years of marriage, child-rearing, and career-building.

But I am troubled. As I look to the future, I see that the gift of a parochial-school faith formation may become a rarity. In some inner cities, Catholic schools have been closed by fiat of the diocese, abandoning students to decrepit and dangerous public school systems. Even in newer suburbs with large school-age populations, some parishes opt against building Catholic schools, signaling to parents that faith formation through CCD is a desirable alternative to a Catholic-school formation.

These trends are demonstrable, real, and national in scope. Data published by the National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA) in 1997 confirm that the total number of Catholic elementary schools in the United States declined from 8,281 in 1976 to 6,903 in 1997, with approximately half a million fewer students enrolled in these schools than twenty years earlier. True, new schools have opened in the past decade, and in the past five years enrollment has shown increases - part of what NCEA president Leonard De Fiore has described as a "true renaissance" for Catholic schools. But NCEA's own research shows that despite these openings, "there is still a great demand for space - many schools have waiting lists."

In sum, the Catholic community in this country appears to be presiding over the gradual dismantling of perhaps its greatest achievement: the creation and maintenance of an academically competitive school system geared to the faith formation of the Catholic young. Parent and pastor, rank-and-file laymen and laywomen, as well as diocesan leaders, all share some responsibility for this decline. Here's why:

In Cincinnati, where I now reside with my husband and two preschool-age children, our parish CCD has swelled beyond the numbers matriculated in our parish school. In part, this comes about because we live in a renowned public school district - one kindergarten teacher has her Ph.D. - where many Catholic parents choose to send their children to the tax-supported bells-and-whistles education offered by our public school. The attitude of these parents is that CCD religious training is sufficient to form and inform their children's Catholicism, and to inoculate their children against the negativity and nihilism of the culture. This attitude betrays a certain naivete about what constitutes adequate faith formation among the young. Even an excellent CCD program, by definition and design, cannot do what a Catholic parish school was built to do: complete the circle of faith begun in the home and lived out in the local parish community and surrounding neighborhood. Unlike the much-studied impact of Catholic schools on the urban poor, the suburban solution of reliance on CCD has not yielded the data needed to prove its worth. As Andrew Greeley noted in his Catholic University paper, "I know of no evidence that 'religious education' has any independent impact at all on subsequent adult behavior of those who participated in it....The case for such programs has not been made, not with any data to back it up."

One would think that this lacuna, coupled with the studies that demonstrate the positive impact Catholic schools have on the Catholic young, argues in favor of a vigorous, sustained debate in the U.S. Catholic community over the differences between CCD and Catholic-school faith formation. At a minimum, our lack of data strongly suggests a pause before opting for the future dominance of a CCD model: a caution that applies not only to parents but to the Catholic leadership, whose silence on the relative merits of these two types of faith formation remains curious and troubling.

Despite the large number of Catholic parents who have opted for CCD in Cincinnati, waiting lists at many parish schools are long. Parents fret over whether space will be available when their children reach kindergarten age. Parish councils are charged with the unpleasant task of defining how admission to these schools will be determined. Transferring into many of these schools in later grades is virtually impossible; the space isn't there. I have heard firsthand stories from other dioceses across the country where families must compete for limited space in their parish schools, a situation acknowledged by the NCEA.

This scarcity, unheard of when I was growing up, is caused, in part, by shifting demographics. As suburbs push further and further out from city limits, the families that follow search for nearby Catholic schools to accommodate their children. An absence of geographic parish boundaries in some dioceses, coupled with the failure of some newer parishes to build or sponsor schools, has launched an avalanche of applications for admission to good parish schools in the vicinity.

For example, here in Cincinnati the largest parish in the archdiocese has no school. This parish functions as a "hyper-church." It caters to support groups of every stripe: the young, the old, the divorced, the widowed, the rosary-praying, the child-raising, the socially conscious, and the just plain social. I'm told that building a school, entailing the commitment to a single purpose that bricks and mortar require, is not a likelihood. The decision by such a parish not to build a school - this in an area with large numbers of school-age children - has a significant impact on all the neighboring parish schools, which are now stretched to overcapacity by the children from the hyper-parish.

This decision, and similar ones made by like-minded parishes across the country, reveal an undercurrent of individualism, certainly at play within the secular culture, that has seeped or flooded into the American Catholic community. Notions of stewardship, the common good, the responsibility of all adults in a community to rear the young, have weakened or disappeared. We are left with adults who view themselves as autonomous, who join and invest only in those groups and activities that are of benefit to themselves. Sacrificing for others and for those who will follow in our footsteps no longer seems a natural, to-be-expected response.

Another emerging trend that further undermines the Catholic parochial school system is the home-schooling movement. In some cases home schooling is a parental reaction to the religious training being offered in the parish school, perceived by some as offering a "watered-down" catechesis, or, in rarer cases, as being too traditional. In both cases, parents pull the children out of the parish school, and either teach them at home or try to launch and support alternative private schools.

These are trends that further weaken the already tenuous ties that hold parish communities together. Circling the wagons through home schooling deprives the parish schools of these parents' insights and talents and of their children's participation and example in the school. Launching private academies tends to make the faith formation of the Catholic young look rather like an exercise in choosing ice cream: pick the flavor that fits your taste. And these choices heighten a divisiveness among the Catholic faithful over what faith should be handed down to the Catholic young. Where we cannot agree, we do not stay and dialogue, persuade, and build consensus. Instead, we dissent, depart, and build a rival ice cream shop.

A still bleaker picture is emerging in the inner cities. Here, despite remarkable achievements, past and present, evidenced in mounds of statistics attesting to high academic standards and quality-of-life improvements, Catholic schools are struggling to survive. Vanishing religious vocations that once assured a supply of low-cost labor, accompanied by soaring costs for insurance and the maintenance of aging buildings, make the inner-city schools voracious dinosaurs, eating up a disproportionate share of diocesan and parish finances as the Catholic population joins in the flight to the suburbs.

Still, the presence of Catholic schools in urban wastelands is a signal that those communities are worth something to us, the church. The good done by these schools cannot be measured adequately in dollars expended but rather in lives rescued and enriched. The children who attend the schools, many of them not Catholic, are literally saved by this type of intervention, and their families are afforded a lesson in Christian stewardship and solidarity.

What is to be done? First, we need a deep appreciation of what the parochial school system in the United States has achieved in the past in forming the faith of the Catholic young, constituting a legacy that should not be squandered. Simply allowing present trends to continue without fact-finding, reflection, discussion, and debate would be irresponsible.

Second, discussion of the future of Catholic faith formation must not be left to parish councils or diocesan commissions or to professional organizations operating under the aegis of the national hierarchy. This is a policy choice, or a set of choices, that should engage us all. Whether or not we are parents, we are all stewards of our heritage, accountable for its preservation and transmission to the future. Granted, there are no mechanisms for decision-making or policy-setting by the American Catholic community as a whole. But if the centrality of this concern is grasped, it will be seen that our future course should not be delegated, consciously or by default, to a select group of our peers, or to the "professionals." And there are ways in which discussion and debate can be brought to the forefront of our consciousness.

Third, and significantly, the path to maintaining an available and affordable parochial school system lies, I believe, in solving the financial riddle created when parish schools lost most of the subsidy provided by the low-cost labor of nuns and priests who have been replaced by more expensive (though still underpaid) lay teachers. This factor, coupled with the substantial costs of building and maintaining a school system today, virtually assures that a parochial school system can survive in the long term only through the development of an ambitious, long-range, comprehensive financial strategy. Carrying out this task will require not only financial skills but considerable commitment, and without grassroots, wide-ranging involvement from rank-and-file Catholics, lay and cleric alike, the undertaking will fail. In my estimation, feasible solutions exist; many are already on the drawing board, including lobbied-for tax credits (never fully embraced by the Catholic electorate as a high-priority campaign issue) and/or a school system financed by endowment.

Decisions made by individual dioceses to close inner-city schools that are financially draining, though they serve as true sanctuaries for their students; decisions made by individual pastors and parish councils not to build schools but instead to rely on CCD programs; decisions made by families to use public schools and entrust their children' religious formation to CCD classes; decisions by other parents for home schooling or sponsorship of private academies - all these imperil the extraordinary achievements of the Catholic school system in this country. We - that is, the rest of us, the larger church - have failed to address the consequences these decisions will have. We have not thought and talked about what needs to be done to force a change in the attitudes and economics driving our school system toward decline and demise. What will be the state of faith formation of the Catholic young in the year 2050? By then, will the legacy of available, affordable parochial schools have been frittered away? And if so, at what cost to the faith and the faithful? The issue of how we rear children in the faith deserves our full attention: hearts, minds, and pocketbooks.

Only for the rich?

The history of the Catholic church in the United States is largely one of transition from the poor, immigrant church of the ghetto to a church of the suburbs. Most American Catholics need. only look back a generation or two to mark the approximate point their families became "middle class." Chances are they owe it to a Sister Agnes or a Sister Mary Alice. For the institution most responsible for that transition is the Catholic school, and the people most responsible are the nuns. Their insistence on hard work, their uncompromising faith in God, their belief that all students could succeed, and their personal financial sacrifices spoke eloquently of the church's broader mission to serve the poor within the United States.

But the mission of the sisters was never primarily economic. If that were all there was to it, many could argue "mission accomplished." First and foremost, the mission was to mediate Catholic culture to students.

Given that aim, the need for Catholic schools is more acute now than ever. We live in a society that trivializes our faith by privatizing it and, worse, is openly hostile to religious claims. We are too busy to recognize that our Catholicism no longer defines us, that our values, spending habits, language, and attitudes are indistinguishable from anyone else's. It is not our faith but our social class that shapes us.

We need Catholic schools as an antidote to our religious amnesia. We need them to remind us about the beauty of God in "dappled things": our students - rich-poor, black-white-red-yellow-brown, smart and learning-disabled. We need schools to train our children in the practices of the church - its songs, its liturgy, its prayers, its customs - and to prompt them to be open to grace. We need Catholic schools because we and our children need to be called to serve others.

The nuns, of course, are largely gone. In 1873, the Sisters of Loretto founded the Catholic high school in Montgomery, Alabama, where I am now principal. One hundred twenty-four years later, in 1997, the last of these sisters left the school. She had been a chemistry teacher for thirty-five years; before that she taught first, second, and third grade in combined classes of forty-five. I presume she is trying to get some rest at the Loretto motherhouse in Kentucky, though I doubt that this remarkable woman is handling retirement gracefully.

We in Montgomery, as in many other Catholic communities across the nation, find ourselves at the crossroad: Who will continue the historic mission of the sisters? The pressure is on. The cost of a Catholic education has risen dramatically in order to pay salaries for lay faculty (still, the average Catholic school teacher earns from $5,000 to $8,000 a year less than a public school teacher). High school tuitions in diocesan Catholic high schools are between $3,000 and $5,000 a year. Middle- to lower-middle-class families, particularly those with more than one child, can barely afford to send their children to Catholic schools any longer.

I find distressing the number of affluent younger Catholics - themselves living testimonials to the success of Catholic schools - who are opting out of Catholic schools and placing their children in private schools. They have the economic means to help Catholic schools the most. But for many of them, social pressures to be in the "right" circles, or the expectation that Catholic schools should have all the accouterments of a wealthy suburban or private school (state-of-the-art athletic programs, finely manicured campuses, the newest technology) pull them away.

There are trade-offs. A woman of considerable means recently told me that her child was not in a particular Catholic school because "it didn't have a decent fine arts program." This lack would have forced her to "seek out private lessons at some expense and inconvenience to the family." But was the cost of these lessons more or less than the difference in tuition between the private and the Catholic school? And was she equally "inconvenienced" by taking her daughter to another place for her religious education, presumably a CCD class? And did those classes do a better job than the Catholic school? Is it more important to have her daughter receive art lessons at school or to grow up within a Catholic community where the practices and values of the church are regarded as "normal" by the students? Of course we should have good fine arts programs in Catholic schools. I don't want families to be forced to choose between the arts and religious education! But we cannot offer comprehensive fine arts programs if that means we become too expensive for middle-class Catholics. We can't become a private school with a Catholic label. Here, I believe, affluent Catholics have a special responsibility, for with their assistance, Catholic schools can provide a quality education for all children, even as we keep tuitions down.

For those of us who work in the schools, the tradition of excellence in teaching and character formation - which is the sisters' legacy - is both daunting and encouraging. It is daunting because people have come to expect much from Catholic schools. It's encouraging because we realize the potential transforming effects Catholic schools can have on both students and families. Most of our families are proof of this fact.

Faustin N. Weber is principal of Montgomery Catholic High School in Montgomery, Alabama.

Kathleen McGarvey Hidy is a practicing attorney in Cincinnati, Ohio.