"Faith Formation" Tuition

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Does anyone else think it’s odd that churches charge so much for sending your kids to Sunday School? Parishes near me are charging, like $50 and one has you sign a paper saying that you can’t hold the church responsible for anything at all that happens to your child while there. What’s going on in Sunday school that’s so dangerous? Why is it so expensive? :confused:
 
One reason is the fact that in our parish, religious education accounts for 2 percent of the total operating budget. I think that says how much catholics really feel about the importance of Sunday School or CCD. The second part is that we live in a lawsuit happy world to the point that even our Churches arent safe anymore. What a shame. Why cant their be a Sunday School offering, that would help pay for supplies and material. I remember as a protestant when I was growing up, my mother gave me a little change for Sunday School.
 
“Where your treasure is, so is your heart.” I think that’s true for both individuals and parishes.

The charges for religious education bothers me. I know that Churches have budgets, but the “fee for service” mentality gets out of hand. Our parish charges a fee for almost everything. Hopefully no one will initiate an admission fee to Mass!

Rather than all the “nickle and diming” I’d like to see the promotion of personal stewardship combined with group responsibility.
 
I don’t have a problem with paying for Religious Education or any other service. The unpleasant fact of the matter is that too many people will happily enroll their kids in Religious Education programs, or have their children baptized, or be married, or have a funeral in a parish to which they do not contribute financially. Why should I as a registered parishioner who contributes generously to my parish be picking up the tab for marrying, baptizing, educating, and burying people who don’t choose to support the parish? Let’s face it $50 per kid per year is a darn good bargain. You can’t get piano lessons or a sports program for that amount. Seems to me that works out to less than a buck an hour.
 
Faith formation isn’t like a sports program. My point is that it seems unseemly to charge people to be taught the faith.
 
I agree. There should be no fee for a Catholic education. However Catholics are some of the stingiest christians in the world and the bills have to get paid somehow. So tuition and fees it is.
 
Well, books, materials, supplies must be paid for somehow.

People have no problem with shelling out $50 or more for a dinner, play, sports tickets, movies, etc. But when it comes to religion, it’s too much money…:hmmm:
 
as a DRE I propose an alternative: I will charge you for the actual cost of materials, $15-20 for textbook, $4 for bible $8 for catechism, (more for a children’s bible), $4 each for cost of photocopying “Catholic Prayers and Practices” in English and Spanish, $8 per child for photocopies misc. for one year, and $4 per child for consumables (crayons, paper etc.). This does not cover my (exceedingly modest) salary, nor that of my part-time secretary, my computer and software for record-keeping and preparing syllabus and materials, and does not even address costs associated with sacramental preparation. this also does not cover materials for training catechists and their ongoing formation, materials for parent meetings, snacks for youth who volunteer as for two sessions, videos, AV equipment, AC and lights for the school building we use for CCD, toilet paper and paper towels, janitor’s wage to clean the mess your kids leave behind.
 
Maybe this is the way that churches need to do things when people give so little. But charging for text book, Bible, photocopying, crayons etc. is just just a more detailed version of what we already do. I think we need to encourage GIVING more.

Perhaps Religious Education Directors and Pastors could institute policies such as “free CCD to tithing parishionors”. If families gave 10% of their income to the Catholic church, the whole question of how to pay for supplies would be moot. I’m annoyed at all the requests for little checks when I prefer to write big ones. I suspect that R.E. Directors and Pastors would prefer to see big checks too, but instead they ask for little ones.

We need more generousity. Fees are just bandaids for the real problem.
 
I love that one Annie. We charge $15 per child and the book alone is more than that. We have no paid staff but we do have overhead (utilities, insurance etc) and supplies that are needed on top of that. We waive the fee for about 1/4 to a 1/3 of the children who enroll due to financial difficulties.

That being said, there is a parish near us that charges $150 for sacrament prep and it is a home study program. They said they didn’t have enough volunteers this year. That I don’t understand.
 
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puzzleannie:
as a DRE I propose an alternative: I will charge you for the actual cost of materials, $15-20 for textbook, $4 for bible $8 for catechism, (more for a children’s bible), $4 each for cost of photocopying “Catholic Prayers and Practices” in English and Spanish, $8 per child for photocopies misc. for one year, and $4 per child for consumables (crayons, paper etc.). This does not cover my (exceedingly modest) salary, nor that of my part-time secretary, my computer and software for record-keeping and preparing syllabus and materials, and does not even address costs associated with sacramental preparation. this also does not cover materials for training catechists and their ongoing formation, materials for parent meetings, snacks for youth who volunteer as for two sessions, videos, AV equipment, AC and lights for the school building we use for CCD, toilet paper and paper towels, janitor’s wage to clean the mess your kids leave behind.
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Our CCD tuition is $105/yr, plus a registration fee AND a book fee. Our parish “pays” its volunteer CCD teachers a $10/day stipend. Salaries are the biggest part of the budget. As someone who taught CCD, I would have skipped the salary altogether to keep costs down for the families.

I would have to pay the tuition even if I homeschooled my kids on our parish’s homeschool option.

It’s a bit goofy to charge a fairly high tuition to be able to pay volunteers a token salary.

Cathy
 
without having any idea of the costs involved in putting on their program, I can’t comment on what any other parish charges. Our fees have stayed the same thru the last 3 DREs & more than 15 years, $25 per child, break for families, waived for need. Parish budget for CCD has also stayed the same in that time (apart from salary and overhead) in spite of nearly twice as many families being served, and new programs including youth group, young adult class, Spanish sacramental preparation, catechist formation, and RCIA adult evangelization now coming under CCD budget. Fees pay less than half the expense, and I am sending out dunning notices now to those who have not paid, (at least 1/3 of the families in the most affluent parish in our end of the diocese).
 
150 dollars tuition for Sunday school? And you have to pay it even if you homeschool? That in the end to me sounds like you are paying for the sacrament and that is simony. I think this “tuition” for CCD is crazy. Before anyone pounds me, our parish budget for CCD is only 2-4 percent. Maybe if we put our money where its important, and thats the religious education of our children, we wouldnt have to charge. Why are those percentages so low? Maybe why thats why so many of our children dont even know the basics of our faith. And if it is true that religious education begins at home, and I can agree with that, then let me teach my own chidren. I would never pay that much for tuition even if I had a million dollars in the bank. In our parish it is 10 dollars per child and 20 dollars maximum per family even if you have 5 children in CCD. This is fair and reasonable.
 
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