In my own parish school, there is no tuition, whether a family has one or ten children in the school. The family must be registered in the parish and be participating in the stewardship program, part of which includes tithing a percent of income.
Since families have varying amounts of income, naturally not everyone is tithing the same amount. This can only work if the parish as a whole is committed to stewardship and to education.
Well, this should certainly work.
But what your parish is doing is closing the parish school to any family which chooses not to tithe. Pretty much by definition, if you have enough tithing families to populate an elementary school, you’re not going to have financial problems at the school.
In my experience, though (Archdiocese of Philadelphia), most parishioners don’t tithe - and that includes most parishioners who want to have their kids in the parish school. In our parish, the annual tuition is approaching $2,000 for a first child (we have discounts for additional children in a family), and it’s touch and go to make the budget work, with about 160 kids enrolled (K-8). There’s a substantial subsidy from the general parish budget, and many school fundraisers (Bingo!). The median family income in our community is in the range of $55K. You don’t want to know what the median annual family contribution to the parish is; it’s nowhere near $5K, or even half that.
So what should we do? Close the school to those who decline to contribute (tithing, active support of fundraising, whatever)? Close the school altogether? Raise tuition?
The best answer might be to merge some parishes - some of those with 1,500 families “registered,” which see 350-400 envelopes in the collection plate on Sunday, and total mass attendance of around 1,200. There would be a problem on Christmas and Easter…but the rest of the time, most of the local parishes have substantial excess capacity.
