This may be a completely rhetorical question but why are Catholic schools so expensive???? I've been told because they are considered private schools but why? You'd think you would at least get some kind of a break if you were a member of the parish but not really. And here's the really astounding part...here in Texas it would cost about 3500 dollars for one child in kindergarten (and it increases from there) but in Oklahoma it was only about 1000 dollars a year. I'm sorry but three kids at 3500 bucks a pop ain't happenin! And most of the schools I've checked into stop at eighth grade. Then they'd have to go to a public high school. If I were to do it (and that's a mighty big if), I would want them to go the full 12 years. And something else I found out in my research was that most of the teachers in these schools aren't even Catholic! Why not just send them to public school? Are the days of priests and nuns teaching at Catholic schools gone? Any thoughts?

-- jackiea (jackiea@hotmail.com), March 24, 2000

Answers

[Posted by J. F. Gecik, Thursday night, March 23, 2000]

Hi, Jackiea.

I cannot speak with the authority of personal experience on this. I can only pass along what I have observed, have been told by good parents, and have read in Catholic publications.

The best option is to send kids to a Catholic school, if it truly teaches the whole faith without hiding anything and without mixing in falsehoods, if it provides a weekly Mass for the children, and if it allows the parents to take their role as their kids' primary educators. Let's assume you have an excellent school. Next, the school must also be something you can afford. If it seems not to be, try to work out a special financial arrangement with the pastor, who is supposed to cooperate with you. Every added child's tuition should be lower than the one before. Go to the bishop for help if necessary. Try to track down scholarships -- such as from the Knights of Columbus or other benevolent societies.

If it just turns out to be impossible, the next best option is home-schooling. There are Internet sites to guide you through the whole process. There are Catholic men and women who have begun organizations (a long time ago) to provide you with texts and lesson plans. [Let me know if you can't find them.] Home-schooled children do even better scholastically than Catholic school children, who in turn do better than private (and much better than public) school children. Furthermore they get lots of high school and college scholarships, and then they excel again. Fears of stunted social development have proved to be unfounded. Parents can even find sports teams for home-schooled children to join.

The last option (shudder) is to use public schools, where violence (weapons, etc.), drugs, sex education, poor study habits, truancy, dropping out, and sexual experimentation are so much more likely to be found. I am certainly not condemning all public schools, teachers, students, and curricula. Everyone has heard of excellent adult Catholics who have gone through 12 or even 16 years of public education. But I think that such people have been incredibly fortunate to have overcome heavy odds.

God bless you with a happy outcome in your search.
John
PS: I'm not sure if this applies only to Catholic colleges, but I remember reading that the Vatican has required that schools have Catholics as a majority of their faculty members. I believe that, by Canon Law, a non-Catholic is not permitted to teach religion in a Catholic school. There are still some priests, brothers, and sisters teaching in Catholic schools, but the numbers (especially of sisters) have descended dramatically since 1970. The reasons are many, and here are just a few: (1) smaller families (due to contraception and abortion) result in fewer young people available to respond to religious vocations; (2) fewer priests and families encourage boys and girls to pray/think about religious vocations; (3) society [especially the media] tells kids that their goals should be money and sex; (4) radical feminists [promoted by the media] told women in religous orders during the 1960s through 1980s to abandon convents for a more fulfilling, liberated life; (5) sisters abandoned educational apostolates to do more "relevant" work.


-- J. F. Gecik (jgecik@desc.dla.mil), March 24, 2000.

Dear Jackie, I am a product of Catholic school all my life. My kids are also a product of Catholic school or Separate school, as it is called here in Canada. I attended school in the US. It cost my parents a lot of money and I think it was well worth it. However, I liked school and would probably have done just as well at public school. I also took summer school at the public high school to get extra credits and I really didn't see much difference. However, in Canada, the cost of Separate school is no more that the fees for public school, in fact it may be a little less. There are drugs, violence, sex education, alcohol, swearing, gangs and the lot in the HS level. In the grade school level, there are gangs, sex ed., drugs, swearing and not a whole lot of religious ed, as compared to when I went to school. Mass is only held on religious holidays or the feast of the saint that the school is named for. There is more emphasis on learning for the learning disabled than you would find in the public system. In grade school, the kids do prepare for First Communion, Reconcilliation and Confirmation. It is not like it used to be. There is no learning by rote like "who is God and why did He make you?" There is no memorizing the Ten Commandments, but then again, there is no memorizing the multiplicatiion tables either. The only way for you to be sure that your kids learn the religious precepts that we hold dear, is to teach them at home. Children learn what they live, and if you have a home where religion plays an important role, they will pick up on that and model themselves by it. If you expect the school system to do it for you, think again. My eldest daughter had a gun held at her head in a Catholic HS here and she quit school because the school couldn't or wouldn't guarantee her safety. My youngest daughter is doing school at home, and although she misses the interaction with her peers, she is safe and feels much better. She refuses to even consider attending HS except through home schooling. Ellen

-- Ellen K. Hornby (dkh@canada.com), March 26, 2000.

[Posted by J. F. Gecik, Sunday, March 26, 2000] Hi, jackiea.

I was thinking the other day about what I had written above, and it occurred to me that I may have said something that looked self-contradictory -- namely, that the most academically proficient children are those who are home-schooled, but that parents' "best option is to send kids to a Catholic school."

I should have qualified that by saying that "often" the best option is the school. I am thinking of the fact that there are numerous cases of parents being unable to home-school their children. A single parent can't do it, if he/she has to be the bread-winner. Some stay-at-home parents have to take care of elderly parents. Some know that their help as volunteers in hospitals, etc., are needed during the day. Some parents lack the confidence or personality traits to act as a teacher. Some fear that they don't know enough, due to being poorly educated themselves. (I have heard that this last group can get a lot of joy out of home-schooling, because they learn so much right along with the kids.) In rare cases, both parents must work, because one very low income would leave the family in dire poverty. I'm sure that others here can think of valid reasons for which it would be better (or absolutely necessary) to send kids to a Catholic school.

Reading Ellen's post made me realize that both she and I have been generalizing for you -- and that situations must vary all over North America. She wrote -- speaking of Catholic schools, I believe -- "There are drugs, violence, sex education, alcohol, swearing, gangs and the lot in the HS level. In the grade school level, there are gangs, sex ed., drugs, swearing and not a whole lot of religious ed, as compared to when I went to school."

I hope that her description is only accurate to her local area, rather than widespread throughout North America. It certainly is not true of the Catholic high schools in my diocese. Oh, it may be impossible to prevent a little bit of the vices from creeping in, but my impression (from her words) is that they are just as prevalent as in public high schools in Ellen's part of Canada. I don't believe that to be the case in the U.S., and I certainly hope that it is not in your southern locale, jackiea.

And, very imporantly, if a Catholic high school has "sex ed," it is usually not (and ought never to be) a co-ed "plumbing" and "experimentation" class, but rather a class in which abstinence, chastity, and other virtues are the main focus. A public high school "sex ed" class, I'm told, is pretty much the opposite -- co-ed, heavy on physiology, descriptions of acts, hands-on-the-contraceptives, "your-parents-are-old-fashioned," "abstinence-is-for-nerds," "Heather-has-two-mommies" [i.e., homosexual acts are OK], etc., etc.

God bless you.
JohnG

-- J. F. Gecik (jgecik@desc.dla.mil), March 26, 2000.

Why are Catholic Schools so expensive? Well, the parish of each school covers the majority of all costs associated. There is no state or federal funding to cover the teacher salaries or basic overhead, building repairs, sports activities, extracurricular activities, etc.

Think you can't afford it? Well, any Catholic can. In any diocese, there is a subsidy, but their also is something called "complete assistnce"...that means "free or close to free". If a Catholic family's debt ratio does not permit for the added expense, a petition can be sent to the Bishop of the Diocese. Once the petition is received, a meeting is scheduled with whomever the trustee or leader of the Catholic Schools is in that particular diocese. They give you other options to "make up for" what you cannot afford. Other options include: volunteering for the needs of the school's parish or the school itself and tuition based on scale.

It is part of every single Catholic Diocesian school that "a Catholic student shall not be turned away from a Catholic School for his/her parents' inability to pay." (paraphrasing).

Let's say the average Catholic School has 18 classes (2 classes per grade, K-8). That's 18 teachers. Then you must have a librarian, music teacher, coaches, the principle, secretary and any number of extracurricular instructors. So let's say about 30 educators on a pay scale of only 16,000 a year. That means the parish has to pay about $600,000 a year in salaries alone!

I live in Nashville, where the average cost of tuition is $2400 and the teacher ratio ranges from 16 to 22 per class. I used to teach 4th and 7th graders in the public school system in 3 different states, and I can tell you...those parents and children simply didn't know how much they were missing. Public schools and Private schools should not be in the same category. It's more like "the best education you can get in this country" vs. "the education you'll have to settle for and pay for later."

I'd rather pay the money now then pay for the consequences later.

-- Christina Triana (RomeChurch@aol.com), April 03, 2000.

Christina, Thank you so very much for your answer! I will check into this and see what we can do. You, my dear, are a God send! :)

-- jackiea (jackiea@hotmail.com), April 03, 2000.

I attended a Baptist school before going to a Catholic high school. My high school is only $6500 compared to $10,000 for my Baptist middle school.

Go figure.

-- Alex Steffler (alex@steffler.com), April 13, 2000.

I have read that most Catholic school teachers do not look on their work as a "career" by which to make a lavish living and get "up their in the world," but rather as a vocation by which to serve God and fellow man. Thus, knowing that their employers are not wealthy, they accept lower-than-average salaries. Moreover, the Catholic school systems have been around for more than 100 years and have learned how to economize. Consequently, it is said that each Catholic school student is educated better than a comparable public school student -- and at less than half the cost.

Let me shock you by revealing how ancient I am. When I was in a Catholic grade school, my parents paid no tuition at all. They simply maintained their status as active parishioners, contributing only small amounts each Sunday, because we were lower middle class [though I had no idea of this at the time]. I had my own collection envelopes, in which I probably placed a nickel or dime on Sundays. Oh, I remember that my parents had to pay a big bill for schoolbooks each year -- maybe $12.00.
Then after graduation, I went to a Catholic high school. The tuition each year was about $225.00 (plus book and activity fees), and I had to earn it (and "spending money") by working about three hours per day after school and during the summer.
Finally, it came time for Catholic college. I think that I had to pay about $2,500 to $3,000 per year -- covering tuition, room, and board. The only way I could manage this was through a partial scholarship, a state government loan, and a part-time job (full-time during summer) on campus.

How times have changed. I could say that I simply don't understand how tuitions have ballooned since those days in the 1950s to mid-1970s, but I would be lying. The main reason is not so much inflation as it is the exodus of men and women religious who used to be the great teaching corps for the Catholic schools of America. Now the lay teachers, though underpaid, are give vastly more than the religous had been given. There are other reasons, but I'm sure that this is the main one.

Let us pray for our schools and teachers. Some teaching orders of women are beginning to bloom again (e.g., the "Nashville Dominicans," the Carmelites of the Sacred Heart).
John

-- J. F. Gecik (jgecik@desc.dla.mil), April 13, 2000.