By Jaweed Kaleem
Miami Herald
January 22, 2009
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/miami-dade/story/866478.html
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| Sacred Heart Catholic School in Homestead, Florida. |
Investment losses, decreasing revenue and rising costs have been blamed for the closure of a number of Catholic schools in South Florida.
When the Archdiocese of Miami announces Thursday the closure of struggling schools, it will echo a national trend that has engulfed the Catholic education system. Schools are shutting by the dozens each year, with a thousand gone in a decade.
Reasons include tens of millions of dollars lost in the falling stock market, declining donations and tithes and the cost of settling hundreds of priest sexual abuse cases, scholars of Catholic education say. Increased insurance and operation costs have hurt, as well.
National Catholic school enrollment has plunged from a peak of 5.2 million in 1960 to 2.2 million in 2008. Enrollment in South Florida schools has held steady at 36,000 to 38,000 since 2000 -- about where it was in the '70s. But a population shift toward the Everglades has filled up westward schools and left some closer to the east with insufficient enrollment to survive.
Archbishop John C. Favalora is expected to announce Thursday that these schools will close in June: St. Francis Xavier in Overtown, Corpus Christi in Allapattah and Holy Family in North Miami. Sacred Heart in Homestead and St. Stephen in Miramar have already announced they will close. St. Monica Catholic School in Miami Gardens shut down last June.
''Nobody could see the economic crisis we're in,'' said Mary Ross Agosta, spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of Miami.
``The church is not immune to what individuals, families, other nonprofits and corporations have been dealing with for almost two years.''
CASH SUPPORT
The archdiocese annually gives as much as $300,000 each to about 15 struggling schools. This support -- either from an archdiocese, parish or both -- has become common nationally as affluent Catholic families move deeper into the suburbs, leaving urban schools established for them to serve a pool of increasingly non-Catholic, less affluent and often minority students.
Most of the doomed schools in South Florida are in poor neighborhoods where public schools are average at best.
Last week, the Archdiocese of Brooklyn proposed closing 14 elementary schools. The dioceses of Philadelphia and Lansing, Mich., recently announced their own set of closures. Last year, the Archdiocese of Washington kept open a few ailing schools by converting them into charter schools -- without religious instruction.
''It's created a huge loss for American society,'' said Daniel Curtin of the Washington-based National Catholic Educational Association. ``How are we going to train our students in terms of religious education? . . . And it's not just teaching religion, but teaching them in all aspects as well.''
Agosta said property insurance increases of 10 to 20 percent annually and investment losses have made it next to impossible to save some schools.
While Catholic education experts say the priest abuse settlements have affected schools nationally, Agosta said South Florida settlements -- the archdiocese reports $21.3 million spent through April 2007 -- are covered by ''several insurance policies'' and have ``never impacted schools.''
She added that students whose schools close will be welcomed at surviving Catholic schools nearby. Students at Sacred Heart Catholic School in Homestead have been offered preferential admission to Our Lady of Holy Rosary -- 12 miles away in Cutler Ridge -- but some parents say that's too far.
The Archdiocese of Miami runs more than 70 schools with about 36,000 students in Miami-Dade, Broward and Monroe counties. Not all are struggling. As families have moved west, many Catholic schools in those areas have flourished. St. Bonaventure Catholic School in Davie, which serves western Broward, including Weston, has traditionally had a waiting list. A large influx of Catholic South Americans, many from Venezuela and Colombia, has swelled the rolls.
''We just opened for registration [for fall 2009] this week and it looks very good. We will probably have to turn people away,'' said Shirley Sandusky, principal at St. Mark Catholic School in Southwest Ranches. ``We won't have space.''
St. Mark, which opened 14 years ago and also pulls students from Pembroke Pines and Plantation, has grown from two dozen students to 700 as the area has grown in population.
MORE AFFLUENT
The excess demand at suburban schools is in line with what has happened in many American cities as Catholic families have become more affluent, said Timothy R. Scully, a professor at the University of Notre Dame and chairman of the Alliance for Catholic Education. American Catholic schools were first established in the late 1800s to serve poor Irish and Italian immigrants who experienced discrimination in public schools.
The loss of Catholic schools also reflects a larger religious shift in the United States, he said, where church participation and the importance of religion in people's lives has gradually declined since mid-century.
''The community may not value Catholic education as it once did,'' Scully said. ``It's hard for me to believe that we don't have the resources to keep these schools running. Now is the moment of reckoning.''
Contact: jkaleem@MiamiHerald.com
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