Diocese prepares strategic plan to save Catholic education as schools brace for shake-up

[commenter]

The article in the Buffalo News makes clear that strategic closures are just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The problem is a shrinking market for Catholic schooling, and closing schools just accelerates that process, as demonstrated by the continued enrollment declines in surviving schools.

The only real solution is to expand the market, and the only way to expand the market is to improve the product. My parish’s school was one of 13 slated for possible closure in the Washington Archdiocese five years ago, having experienced a 50% enrollment decline in eight years. The parish decided not only to fight to keep the school open, but to “make the school worth saving,” as members of a new Curriculum Committee put it. The Committee created a Catholic Classical educational plan, which is now in its fourth year.

The results? The other 12 endangered schools all closed. Our school is now at full enrollment, with waiting lists, and our plan is being implemented at other Catholic schools around the country – including one in upstate New York.

We succeeded not by shrinking the supply, but by growing the demand. This can be replicated anywhere in the country. People are willing to sacrifice to give their children an education that is truly excellent, and one that is fully grounded in the riches of the Catholic tradition.

Our success story has been reported on in secular media like the Washington Post, National Public Radio, and CNN. Here is a recent EWTN news video about the miracle at our school:

youtu.be/4krWDbZwseE?t=…

I hope the Catholics in Buffalo don’t give up on Catholic education. There IS a way out of the crisis.

Sounds great! However, our own local Diocese has signed on (I would say “kneeled down”) to the Common Core promoted by the secular educators, then they try to add on Catholic things to that. It’s hard for Catholic schools to identify themselves as significantly different from the public schools. Sure they emphasize values, but so do the public schools.
There are groups here and there in my city that try to do things very different, to scrap the whole public school template and put in a classical curriculum. There are “cottage schools” which are in theory home schools but they offer classroom education in a school building, from one to five days a week. They have to keep a low profile, spread mostly by word of mouth.
There is an effort to start a local Chesterton Academy, a high school modeled after the one in Minneapolis. The problem is that these classical efforts can’t exactly be advertised as Catholic schools, but as “schools in the Catholic tradition”. It seems so painful and expensive to let existing schools close, then open from scratch something new, with no public school template, no union contract, no baggage you have to fight for change, inch by inch, committee meeting by meeting. It is easier to start new than to change an existing structure? not sure.
Thank you for sharing your school’s story. I would like to hear others’ stories, how an existing school was changed, or how something totally different and authentically Catholic was begun.

 

[Megan7]

buffalonews.com/city-region/schools/diocese-prepares-strategic-plan-to-save-catholic-education-as-schools-brace-for-shake-up-20140104

Thanks A.