USA
Amid pandemic, future of many Catholic schools is in doubt

THEY ARE CONSIDERED PRIVATE SCHOOLS

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St. Francis Xavier School students and their families walk together in Newark, on Thursday, Aug. 6, 2020, after discussing the Catholic school's permanent closure announced the previous week by the Archdiocese of Newark. Nationwide, more than 140 Catholic schools will not reopen in the fall. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

NEW YORK (AP) — As the new academic year arrives, school systems across the United States are struggling to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic. Roman Catholic educators have an extra challenge — trying to forestall a relentless wave of closures of their schools that has no end in sight.

Already this year, financial and enrollment problems aggravated by the pandemic have forced the permanent closure of more than 140 Catholic schools nationwide, according to officials who oversee Catholic education in the country.

Three of the nation’s highest-ranking Catholic leaders, in a recent joint appeal, said Catholic schools “are presently facing their greatest financial crisis” and warned that hundreds more closures are likely without federal support.



“Because of economic loss and uncertainty, many families are confronting the wrenching decision to pull their children out of Catholic schools,” said New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley and Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

They urged Congress to include funding in the next pandemic relief bill for scholarship assistance for economically disadvantaged families to use at Catholic or other private schools.

Many Catholic schools already have received substantial federal aid from the U.S. Department of Education and from the Paycheck Protection Program, which was designed to pay wages at businesses or nonprofits impacted by the pandemic.



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 Charles Fabian stands in an empty classroom at Queen of the Rosary Catholic Academy in Brooklyn borough of New York, Thursday, Aug. 6, 2020. In July the Archdiocese of Brooklyn and Queens announced that six Catholic schools in the two boroughs will close permanently at the end of August due to debt and low enrollment aggravated by the coronavirus pandemic. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

Desks are stacked in an empty classroom after the permanent closure of Queen of the Rosary Catholic Academy in Brooklyn borough of New York, Thursday, Aug. 6, 2020. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)




A sign made by parents and students of Queen of the Rosary Catholic Academy hangs on the fence outside the school in Brooklyn borough of New York, Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2020. Queen of the Rosary is one of six Catholic schools in Brooklyn and Queens that will permanently close at the end of August. Nationwide, more than 140 Catholic schools will not reopen in the fall. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

The pace of closures has been relentless since March. Within the past month, Catholic leaders have announced the shuttering of five schools in Newark, New Jersey, and 26 in the New York City area. Among the schools closed earlier was the Institute of Notre Dame in Baltimore, a 173-year-old girl’s high school that’s the alma mater of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Several of the closures have promoted protests and petition campaigns by angry parents, and Catholic officials have been scrambling to help affected families.

The Diocese of Brooklyn’s school superintendent, Thomas Chadzutko, said the closures were unavoidable due to the pandemic’s “devastating effects” on enrollment and finances.

Parents were offered a $500 grant if their children enrolled in other Catholic schools, but many were bitter that the closures were announced with little time to make alternative school plans.

“It is a complete travesty how the Brooklyn Diocese can shut down schools within a pandemic and with less than two months’ notice,” parent Javier Cortes wrote in an online post about the closure of Queen of the Rosary Catholic Academy. “Treating children like this is NOT the Catholic thing to do!”

Also ordered closed was Nativity of Our Blessed Lady, an elementary school in the Bronx.

“I was part of the first graduating class and now I walked out of there hysterical in tears,” said Hope Wilson, who attended the school as a child and later taught there for 30 years.

In Newark, Shante McGlone Burgess was devastated by the news that St. Francis Xavier School was closing. All three of her children attended the elementary school last year, though the family is not Catholic.

St. Francis Xavier students sit together for the first time in five months after their school was closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, Thursday, Aug. 6, 2020, in Newark. The students and their concerned families gathered at the school to discuss its permanent closure, announced by the Archdiocese of Newark the previous week. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

Dozens of students and their family members gather outside St. Francis Xavier School in Newark on Thursday, Aug. 6, 2020, a week after the Archdiocese of Newark announced its permanent closure. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

The Burgess family, from left, Jonathan Jr., 15, Jonathan Sr., Shante, Ava, 6, and Evan, 10, stand outside St. Francis Xavier in Newark, New Jersey, on Thursday, Aug. 6, 2020, as they meet with other parents to discuss the school's closure. "Closing an inner-city school during a pandemic is not the most godly thing to do," Shante Burgess said. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)



Malik Bey, 11, left, stands with his sisters in front of St. Francis Xavier School in Newark, on Thursday, Aug. 6, 2020, as parents meet to fight the school's permanent closure. "Give them a shot," said Bey's father, Malik Bey Sr. "My son has been coming here since kindergarten and he's in sixth grade now. This is what he knows, and the kids are who he knows. Let's leave them together." (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

“They were very welcoming there,” McGlone Burgess said. “At a public school, I don’t think my children would have gotten the same camaraderie, as well as the structure.”

St. Francis Xavier is one of many schools being closed that serve predominantly Black and Hispanic communities. Three bishops who oversee matters related to education and racial issues recently sent an appeal to U.S. Rep. Karen Bass, chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, seeking support for families of color with students in Catholic schools.

“A Black or Latino child is 42% more likely to graduate from high school, and two-and-a-half times more likely to graduate from college if he or she attends a Catholic school,” wrote Bishops Michael Barber of Oakland, California, Joseph Perry of Chicago and Shelton Fabre of the Houma-Thibodaux Diocese in Louisiana.

At the National Catholic Educational Association, there’s acute concern about the closures’ consequences.

“Catholic schools have a very profound impact on young people of low-income backgrounds, students of color, kids from single-parent homes,” said the NCEA’s chief innovation officer, Kevin Baxter “That makes it all the more tragic if we lose the Catholic schools that serve those populations.”

One consequence of the turmoil: increased interest in Catholic-oriented homeschooling.

Chris Sebastian, a spokesman for the Mother of Divine Grace School, said it is preparing to serve about 6,000 students in the new school year, compared with 4,800 last year.

The school, based in California but serving families across the U.S. and overseas, offers a structured Catholic curriculum and assigns an educational consultant to work with each family that signs up.

“COVID is the primary motivator for people enrolling,” Sebastian said. “People are afraid of the pandemic and not wanting the stress of required masks.”

The Rev. Thomas Vassalotti, pastor of Queen of the Rosary Catholic Academy’s parish in New York, said numerous parents affected by that closure — and wary of switching to public schools — are expressing interest in homeschooling, perhaps in a cooperative with assistance from the parish.

For Catholic schools that are reopening, there is no national directive as to how they should handle the question of in-person classes. Decisions are being made diocese by diocese, often influenced by local and state rules.

In Los Angeles, archdiocese officials had hoped to open the new year with in-person classes. They now will have to start out with distance learning, due to an order from Gov. Gavin Newsom barring public and private schools from reopening campuses if their counties are on a monitoring list for high rates of new coronavirus cases.

The situation is different in Dallas, where the diocese plans to open schools Sept. 2, six days before the earliest date when secular schools can start in-person classes. The diocese chose that option after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said religious schools were exempt from local orders delaying in-person instruction.

And in Evansville, Indiana, Catholic schools reopened Aug. 5 with a full program of in-person instruction. Schools were told to spread out desks, place students in small groups and require face coverings.

Mary Pat Donoghue, who heads the education office of the national bishops’ conference, said she expects a wide variety of reopening plans, with a common aim of getting students back in the classroom as quickly as health conditions allow.

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Associated Press video journalist Jessie Wardarski, in New York, and Justin Pritchard, in Los Angeles, contributed to his report.

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support from the Lilly Endowment through the Religion News Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

IN CANADA PUBLIC EDUCATION IS A PROVINCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

IN ALBERTA AND ONTARIO CATHOLIC SCHOOLS ARE CONSIDERED PART OF THE PUBLIC EDUCATION SYSTEM

IN NEWFOUNDLAND THEY HAVE ONE PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM FOR PROTESTANTS AND CATHOLICS 

IN MANY CASES OUTSIDE OF QUEBEC, AND NEW BRUNSWICK (FRANCO CANADIANS) THE CATHOLIC BOARDS EXIST NOT FOR RELIGIOUS REASONS BUT RATHER AS IS THE CASE WITH THE MANITOBA ACT FRENCH LANGUAGE RIGHTS ARE THE REASON FOR THESE 'SEPARATE' SCHOOLS SYSTEMS AS THEY ARE CALLED.