Trouble in the Classroom

Until recently, the lay teacher in a Roman Catholic parochial school was regarded as something of a necessary evil. Thanks to a decline in the number of nun teachers and a rapid growth of Catholic schools, laymen now constitute one-third of the parochial teaching force--and they are no longer content to accept second-class citizenship. In the past six weeks, teacher walkouts have hit three Chicago high schools, while last-minute negotiations narrowly averted similar strikes in New York City and Philadelphia. In the Los Angeles suburb of Mission Hills, 32 male lay teachers of Alemany High School recently negotiated their first written contract with archdiocesan administrators after yet another walkout.

Deficit & Discontent. In each case, the teachers' basic demand was for higher salaries. Although a few dioceses--notably San Francisco and New Orleans--pay their laymen salaries that compare favorably with public school scales, the vast majority in effect require teachers to subsidize the schools by personal sacrifice. At Alemany, for example, the starting wage of lay faculty members before the new contract was $4,000 a year, compared with $6,220 at nearby public high schools. In addition, most parochial school systems have painfully inadequate tenure, pension and medical-insurance programs, provide little chance for laymen to advance into administrative ranks. The inevitable result is not only discontent among laymen but a disturbingly high turnover, as many of the parochial schools' best teachers quit for public school jobs.

Parochial school administrators claim, with some justice, that they lack the means to satisfy the teachers. In the past four years, for example, the operating budget of Philadelphia's archdiocesan secondary school system, which serves 59,000 pupils, has risen from $4,500,000 to $8,500,000. New building needs, plus the recent teacher settlement, which resulted in annual salary increases of from $300 to $1,000, threaten to create a $1,000,000 deficit in the next school year.

Out of the Game? Faced with rising costs, many dioceses have shut down or combined marginal and inefficient schools, and some administrators are beginning to wonder whether it might ultimately be necessary to abandon parochial school education entirely. "If it comes to a point where we couldn't pay a living wage," admits Monsignor Donald Montrose, superintendent of Los Angeles' archdiocesan high schools, "maybe we shouldn't be in the education game." Noting that the expense of maintaining the U.S. church's century-old parochial school system is "becoming a real problem," St. Louis' Joseph Cardinal Ritter recently told a television interviewer: "If we were confronted with the question of whether we should start parochial schools today, I am sure they wouldn't be started."

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