Vindicator
Rookie
- May 30, 2011
- 113
- 8
- 0
- Banned
- #1
As Catholic Schools Close in Major Cities, the Need Only Grows
Over the last half-century, the number of Catholic schools has fallen to 7,000 from about 13,000, and their enrollment to barely two million children from more than five million. A disproportionate share of the damage has come in big cities.
Its unbelievable that you have a school that graduates 100 percent of the kids and sends them to college and shuts the door, said Skip Branch, a basketball coach at the school. His own son, Floyd, graduated from Rice in 2002 and went on to Middlebury College with a full academic scholarship.
However belatedly, parts of Catholic clergy and laity have tried to develop new models. The Nativity Miguel and Cristo Rey networks have opened dozens of small, academically intensive middle and high schools. The Big Shoulders Fund in Chicago provides Catholic schools there with scholarship money, in-kind services like construction, and ties to arts organizations, among other benefits. Arizona gives a tax credit to individuals who donate money for tuition assistance through state-certified groups, including one funneling such aid to Catholic-school families.
None of these efforts, promising and idealistic as they may be, have come close to halting, much less reversing, the pattern of retrenchment. While 34 new Catholic schools opened in the 2010-11 academic year, 172 closed or were consolidated, and nearly 2,000 had a waiting list for admission, according to data from the National Catholic Educational Association. The 24 Cristo Rey high schools together have 6,500 pupils only a couple of hundred more than Philadelphias Cardinal Dougherty High alone had at its height in the 1960s.
To put it in personal terms, when Michael Gecan was growing up on the West Side of Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, the area had 10 parish schools enrolling about 10,000 students in total. These days, when he returns there as a national organizer for the Industrial Areas Foundation, he finds seven or eight much smaller schools with a collective student population of about 1,000.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/04/us/04religion.html?_r=1&hpw
-------------------------------------------------------------
When will somebody start pointing out the truth about this. The super-duper Mexicanos have ruined the Archdiocese of the major cities in the US. They'll only show up when they need the Church to advocate for illegal aliens or to force "leave our gangbangers alone" legislation on communities.