Class Action

The parents themselves were informed by letter on Feb. 9, Ash Wednesday, that their children would soon have to go to St. Sebastian’s in Woodside.
In the other Sunnyside parish, St. Teresa’s, several blocks along 44th street on the south side of Queens Boulevard, families were told their children would have to go to St. Raphael’s in Long Island City. In all, 25 elementary schools in the Brooklyn and Queens diocese will close at the end of the academic year because of declining enrollment.
“Shock and anger,” Leitrim native Fiona Smyth characterized the reaction of the families affected. “There had been talk, but this is sudden”
Added Kerry native Sheila McHale: “Nobody asked the parents.”
“The church has had its fair share of horrible scandals,” Smyth said. “These are the very people who stuck by them.”
“It’s a real blow to everybody,” said Caroline Krone, who immigrated from Ballyjamesduff, Co. Cavan. “If the parents knew, we could have done something about it.”
“It’s a tremendously sad time. Nobody wanted to do this,” said Msgr. Michael J. Hardiman, vicar for education in the diocese, who himself graduated from St. Teresa’s in 1965.
Speaking to the Echo on Friday, Hardiman said: “The decision is final.” He did add, however, that any proposed plan to save an individual school would be considered.
“But it would have to be realistic financially,” he said.
The year Hardiman left it, St. Teresa’s had 1,000 pupils. It was founded in 1927, with an inaugural enrollment of 200. It belonged to a cluster of parishes in Northwestern Queens that were overwhelmingly Irish-American. Queen of Angels, founded in 1956, is a relative newcomer.
From the 1970s, however, the enrollment at Catholic schools went into a long-term decline as Irish- and Italian-Americans in particular moved to the suburbs in increasing numbers.
The process speeded up in more recent times. Eleven thousand pupils were lost to the system over the last five years — 7,000 alone in the last two. Queen of Angels now has just 159 students; St. Teresa’s has about the same.
Hardiman said the prices of property have gone beyond the reach of families in neighborhoods where homes go for half a million dollars. “You can get a beautiful house in New City for half the price,” he noted.
“Some people have left the city; some have gone back to Ireland,” Hardiman said. “And we are experiencing the long-term effects of the terrorist attacks on the city.
“Parents don’t know that pastors and principals have been working on this for months,” the vicar for education added.
Some of the blame can be laid at the door of the church administrators. “For 12 or 13 years, we were not aggressively planning,” he conceded.
But the diocese could hardly anticipate the recent precipitous drop Hardiman said that the closures would allow the remaining Catholic schools to be put on a “firmer foundation.”
But many parents pay the tuition fees because of the smaller class sizes. [The flat rate for enrollment at Queen of Angel is $2,800. Tuition fees are somewhat higher in other schools.] They feel that schools like St. Sebastian’s will be overstretched and they’ve argued that the closures are likely to impact on an overburdened public school system.
“It was one reason we left the city,” Krone said, adding that Sunnyside offered a choice of schools.
The parents have attracted the support of politician such as Congressman Andrew Wiener and several members of the City Council. Wiener convened a summit on Saturday in Brooklyn to which four parents from each of the 25 schools was invited. There, Hardiman repeated the position that the diocese would look at viable proposals to keep individual schools open. Parents would have 30 days to submit a proposal.
“I thought it was positive,” Smyth said of the meeting.
On Sunday evening, it was standing-room-only at Queen of Angels parochial hall as parents grappled with ways to deal with the 30-day deadline.
They had to come up with a business plan, they agreed. But first they have to look at the school’s budget.
“The pastor says we have to get it from the bishop,” parent Steve Martin told the meeting. “And the bishop says we have to get it from the pastor.”
A determined clergy built the Catholic school system; the community followed. Now parents are trying to save their schools without clerical support.

Cheap, accessible education
The situation has been reversed in other ways too. The system provided cheap, accessible education for large numbers of working-class people. Now higher tuition fees are too expensive for many families.
“The Irish were once the poor,” said Glendalough, Co. Wicklow, native Eugene Smyth, before the meeting. “We need to make the school more accessible for the Hispanic community.”
“The parents must have the support of the community,” agreed Helene McGowan, a veteran of a successful campaign to keep Queen of Angels open 17 years ago.
For decades, “community,” “parish” and “neighborhood” were virtually synonymous to Catholic New Yorkers.
The school system is largely identified with County Tyrone immigrant John Hughes, archbishop of New York from 1842 until his death in 1864, who felt that the children and grandchildren of Irish immigrants would only face bigotry in the hostile, Protestant-dominated public school system. Hughes, who had little time for displays of ethnic identity, argued for full assimilation. However, he believed that Catholics could be become American more easily by creating their own parallel institutions, particularly schools.
The outlines of his model survived and thrived for a century and a quarter.
“These were big neighborhoods and big churches,” said J.R. McCarthy, who graduated from the Catholic school system in the late 1970s and now teaches English at Monsignor Scanlan High School in the Bronx. “The schools were built to accommodate hundreds of kids.”
There are continuities. “We are in the same neighborhood with the same working-class population,” he said. “The bottom line is we have the same mission we had 50 years ago.
“The demographics have changed. It used to be Irish, Italian and generally European. Now it’s Latino and African American.
“Obviously somebody cares deeply enough about those children that they’ve made the financial investment.”
McCarthy said that the figures speak for themselves. Up to 90 percent of Catholic school graduates go on to college, at least 10 percentage points more than the public school system.
There’s still a market in the New York diocese for a value-based education, he said.
“And kids who are not of our faith are certainly welcome,” he added.
Hardiman said: “Parents want their children in a particular type of environment.”
But McCarthy said that there’s another important reason, which goes back to Hughes’s goal of providing an alternative in a potentially hostile environment.
“As long as it’s perceived that public schools are dangerous and inefficient, there will always be an interest in Catholic schools,” he said. “That parents don’t have to worry about safety as much is a big selling point. Perception is everything.”
But there’s also the perception that Catholic schoolteachers aren’t as well qualified as those in the public schools, and therefore aren’t as good.
And teachers’ unions have accused the dioceses of betraying Catholic social justice principles by undervaluing employees.
“The average salary is $37,000; tell me who can live on that in New York,” McCarthy said.
But the Bronx native, who has a master’s degree in special education, added that the Catholic system’s teachers are catching up with their counterparts in the public sector in terms of qualifications and certification. He pointed out, too, that Catholic schools have relied on categories of teachers, married women, for example, who’ve been prepared to work for less money.
For a century, though, the system was staffed by an inbuilt source of cheap labor — priests, nuns and brothers. The religious are almost gone now and Irish Americans and other Catholic groups have migrated to the suburbs where as taxpayers they have a vested interest in their public education systems.
Meanwhile, in the city, a majority of Irish immigrants with school-age children are opting for the multicultural public system.
“We’re here for good. I want my son to grow up meeting different types of people,” said one Woodside mother who didn’t want to be named.
The wave of Irish immigrants who came from the 1980s onward are far less religious than their predecessors. And they come from a culture where paying directly for education was not the norm. While many may have gone to schools owned by religious orders, their education was almost wholly subsidized by the Irish state.
Nonetheless, some of those weighing the pros and cons have come down on the side of Catholic education.
Discipline is high on the list for those who pay the thousands of dollars into the Catholic system. “It’s a little bit more strict,” said one mother. “But it’s a mixture of reasons.”
“For me, the religious aspect is important,” Fiona Smyth said.
Smyth and the others leading the makeshift campaign expressed a certain sense of betrayal in the parochial hall Sunday night. They believe now that they were kept in the dark for a year; meanwhile, their ideas for fundraising were being turned down. But they couldn’t run a campaign on bitterness, they knew.
Instead, they discussed the crucial issue of enrollment and how to put together the business plan. It would be tough, but they went into the winter night determined to give it their best shot.