Life After Catholic Schools

Life After Catholic Grade Schools

The History Chanel's show, Life After People, imagines a world one year, five years, 10 years, 50 years, and more after people disappear from the earth.  The show premiered in 2008.  Recent news from Newark (closing 9 schools at the end of this year) and rumblings from many archdioceses and diocese across the country about more school closings has caused me to think about what life would be without Catholic grade schools.  Please don't let this happen in Cleveland...see below for our status towards our goal.

Well, for one thing, we would not have this recent pre-K graduate's experience:

This post was from a friend of mine who quoted her daughter's thoughts!  I can't quite make out the medal she is wearing, but I am certain it is hanging with pride in her bedroom.  Partnership Schools, managing 7 Catholic grade schools in NYC (Bronx and Harlem), never skipped a beat!  The superintendent of Partnership Schools said early on that they are not forming a task force...they are delivering content centered lessons by any means necessary.  You can keep up with regular updates and thought pieces at the Partnership Blog. The mission of Catholic schools has not changed, just how we deliver it.  But the young girl above got it...it is about a loving community delivering instruction and life lessons ("because that's what kindergarteners do.")

Catholic grade schools are nimble and driven by mission.  We can change on a dime and still keep working towards our mission.  

We will not return to the past.  We are, however, on the front lines, learning daily lessons.  I'm of the belief that we will actually get better!

Large metropolitan districts across the country are failing to deliver learning.  A headline from this past week read:  "One in five Boston public school children may be virtual dropouts."

This is not just the case in the pasts few months, it has really been the case for decades in large city public school districts.  The fact that in present-day Cleveland 66% of adults are functionally illiterate really remonstrated that the education received over long periods of time has been poor.  There is a song by Iris DeMent called Living in the Wasteland of the Free, it is a protest song written in 1996 containing this lyric, "We got high-school kids running around in Calvin Klein and Guess who cannot pass a sixth-grade reading test." Fashions have changed, but the reading results haven't!

Life without Catholic schools is a scary thought.  In total, 52,944 students in Ohio’s Catholic schools have been awarded state scholarships for the current school year to fund tuition through the EdChoice Scholarship, EdChoice Expansion, or the Cleveland Scholarship, at a cost of approximately $160 million. Because nonpublic schools supplement the scholarships in order to provide education, the educational value that those students receive is in excess of $280 million. According to the state’s own calculations, that same education would cost taxpayers over $514 million at the ODE’s published cost of $9,724 per pupil. And these are just the students whose families the state gives direct support to choose private schools.  

 Ohio’s Catholic schools also educate more than 74,000 Ohio students in grades K-12 who receive no support from the state. This gift of Catholic education is a saving to taxpayers who would require another $719 million to educate these students were they to be in public schools. One could almost say that Catholic schools are twice as good (Ok, I'm biased) for half the cost!

Six Days to go to reach our goal!

This past week we received gifts and pledges of $225,000 to get us to within $205, 000 of our $3,000,000 goal by June 1!!  We still have active asks out and any gift, of any size, will obviously get us closer!

If you have any questions or wish to make a pledge payable by June , 2021, please contact me at richardfclark@gmail.com. The urgency of this mission increases each day.  A recent article (click on this link for full story) this way:  "More than 600 of the nation's Catholic schools may have to permanently close because of this pandemic’s economic fallout. Family wages are dropping due to widespread furloughs and unemployment. The tuition payments, difficult for families to bear before, have become burdens that are simply impossible for many families to carry. For American children who rely on Catholic schools, our health crisis has become an economic crisis, and our economic crisis has become an education crisis that wounds the family, the nation, and the church."

Please help us, as my young friend said, "Because that is what kindergartners would do!"

Subscribe to my Nuzzel

I curate and comment on the past week's news through an app called Nuzzel.  Over 200 people subscribe.  I hope you would consider doing the same at https://nuzzel.com/richardfclark.