A Fiscal Crisis

The Roman Catholic school system in the U.S. is in serious, even desperate financial trouble. In Milwaukee this month, the Catholic office of education announced that 18 schools in the ten-county archdiocese will close this year for lack of funds. In Detroit, eight schools have already announced closing, and 42 others have been told that they must decide between consolidation and shutting down. In Philadelphia, the Catholic school system has mounted a mammoth fund-raising drive to head off a possible $10 million deficit next year. In at least half a dozen states, parochial-school lobbies are badgering their state legislatures for some kind of immediate help. It is needed: last year alone, 637 Catholic schools in the U.S. shut their doors, and the total will be higher in 1969.

Tax Burden. The fiscal bind is the same one that faces every school system in the nation, public or private: soaring costs of construction and plant maintenance, more expensive training aids and equipment, and a doubling of teachers' salaries during the past decade. But some of the bills piling up are the result of specifically Catholic problems. The rising cost of teachers, for example, is even worse for parochial schools because there are fewer members of religious orders available for teaching jobs. The reason is the sharp decrease in religious vocations, plus a diversification of some orders into other lines of work, like inner-city social action. A decade ago, there were three times as many nuns, priests and brothers teaching as there were lay instructors; now the numbers are just about equal.

Almost every parochial-school system has had to raise its tuition rates to the limit of parental tolerance, and even beyond. They are caught in a viciously accelerating cycle: as public-school taxes and parochial-school tuition go up, many parents decide that they cannot afford both. They simply transfer their children to the public school, increasing the tax burden as well as the cost per pupil for those remaining in the parochial schools. In addition, some parents switch to public schools because they are not happy with the uneven quality of parochial education.

If the schools are to survive, money must come from somewhere else--which means federal or state aid. Last year the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Board of Education v. Allen that states could supply textbooks for purely secular subjects (science, mathematics, language) to nonpublic schools, and parochial-school educators hope that the decision eventually may be expanded to allow public aid to parochial-school students for other costs, such as faculty and plant, as well. This approach, based on the rationale of "child benefit," is now being considered by several states.

Faced with the possibility of overloading the public-school system should the parochial schools fail, Pennsylvania legislators last year invoked another principle that had already been ruled constitutional in other applications: "The commonwealth has the right to enter into contracts for the purchase of needed services" to solve public problems, even though the contract may be with a sectarian institution. Similar purchase-of-services bills are also being considered this year by the legislatures of Michigan, Ohio, Maryland and Illinois.

Uncertain Assistance. Passage of any of these support bills will be made possible largely by a dawning realization among non-Catholics that whatever else Catholic education may be, it is a bargain for society. Parochial schools keep the average per-pupil cost to an estimated national average of $300--less than a half of the $625 it costs to educate a child in public schools. It is no bargain for the taxpayer when a Catholic parent decides that he can no longer afford the $100 or more in yearly tuition that a parochial school may cost. A Catholic-school official in New York estimated that transfers into public schools will add $30 million to the state's education bill this year, perhaps $50 million next year. If all nonpublic schools in Wisconsin were to close, the taxpayers' burden there would be increased by about $230 million a year.

The uncertainty of government assistance has forced Catholic educators to consider new solutions, short of closing the schools down altogether. One method is to eliminate lower grades. Cincinnati's Archbishop Karl J. Alter pioneered large-scale grade elimination five years ago, when he cut out nearly all first-grade classes from archdiocesan schools. For smaller cities, where public schools have space and the laws allow it, "shared-time" programs may work. In at least 300 communities parochial-school children are allowed to attend public schools for classes in such secular subjects as language, mathematics and the physical sciences. St. Paul's High School, in Chicago, was even designed to be a shared-time school, and it regularly sends students to the nearby public high school for a number of secular courses.

Another approach is to consolidate existing schools. In San Francisco last year, four schools were restructured; three now teach the first six grades only, while the fourth has become a common seventh-and eighth-grade school fed by the others. Successfully mixed in the new junior high are twelve-and 13-year-olds from four disparate parishes: a black ghetto, a largely middle-class white neighborhood, a Mexican-American neighborhood and a Japanese community where the school enrolls many Buddhists. Similar consolidations have been suggested by a new archdiocesan-education board in Chicago, where ethnic parish lines sometimes place poorly utilized schools within a few blocks of each other.

Full Control. One of the underlying factors in the crisis is the fact that the parochial-school "system"--a name it hardly deserves--is basically atomistic. When the U.S. Catholic bishops, meeting at the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1884, decreed that parents had a duty to provide Catholic education for their children, they also decreed that it was the responsibility of each parish to provide an elementary school. Even now, parishes are most often on their own, and many pastors still guard their autonomy jealously. In a knowledgeable new book called Catholic Education Faces Its Future (Doubleday; $5.95), Jesuit Educator Neil G. McCluskey argues that the only adequate answer is full diocesan control. The parish-run school, he states flatly, is an anachronism, and must become an area school, serving several parishes and guided in its curriculum and standards by diocesan planning and policy. Support, says McCluskey, ought to come from "a school tax levied on every adult member of the diocese," whether he is a parent or not--a principle the public schools adopted long ago.

McCluskey insists that a strong Catholic school system thus reorganized can continue to exist for years to come--where the communities want the schools enough to make the needed changes and a solid tradition of Catholic education still prevails. But "no single pattern" need be imposed. In other situations, says McCluskey, the shared-time system may be the answer, or such futuristic variations as the "educational park," where parochial and public schools share a joint facility but operate separately in their own spheres. For Catholic children in public schools, there could be an ecumenical, Christian educational center for religious training. If grades must be closed, McCluskey urges that the first six years be abandoned first. Catholic education, he contends, could do its best job by concentrating on young people between the ages of twelve and 20. An improved and expanded junior-college system, he concludes, would more effectively ensure the religious maturation of students who now rarely get beyond a high school level of religion and would make far more sense than concentrating on the elementary grades.

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