St. Elizabeth School to close
Facing declining enrollment and growing debt, St. Elizabeth Catholic School, a parish school in San Francisco’s Portola District since 1949, will close at the end of this academic year.
The closure was announced at a Feb. 24 parish meeting attended by St. Elizabeth pastor Father Charito Suan, Archdiocese of San Francisco Schools Superintendent Maureen Huntington, Principal Gene Dabdoub and about 100 members of the school and parish community.
Also attending were Monsignor Robert McElroy, representing the archdiocesan Council of Priests, and Father William Brady, pastor of St. Emydius Parish in the nearby Ingleside District.
A four-year effort to reverse the enrollment decline at St. Elizabeth fell short, Huntington said in a letter to the school community.
Current enrollment at the K-8 school is 132 and was expected to fall to 120 next year, she wrote.
That continued erosion and the resulting loss of revenue would have put St. Elizabeth more than 100 students below the 225 benchmark for a K-8 school’s long-term financial health. St. Elizabeth last came close to that level five years ago, when it enrolled 217.
“The efforts of many over the past four years have not resulted in the changes hoped for or expected,” Huntington wrote. “We are at the point where the financial resources have been depleted.”
St. Elizabeth will be the fourth K-8 parochial school to close in the archdiocese in the last 10 years. The previous closures were St. Paul of the Shipwreck and St. Emydius in San Francisco and Mater Dolorosa in Daly City.
Huntington said there are no plans for additional closures.
To assist families in continuing their Catholic school education, the archdiocese held a meeting at St. Elizabeth’s Cantwell Hall last Tuesday to offer parents the opportunity to register at other Catholic schools. Parents who were not able to attend may register their children at other schools after March 2.
“All students wishing to remain in a Catholic school for next year will be given this opportunity,” Huntington wrote. “Schools will make accommodations when and where possible.”
Huntington said that closing the school “is similar to the death of a loved one.”
“The school and parish community will be in a state of mourning and grieving for many months,” she wrote. “It is heartbreaking and sad, hard to comprehend and understand. Yet 60 years of educating students in our Catholic faith need to be celebrated. I encourage you to do just that over the next few months.”
“I sincerely wish that things had been different, that we would have been able to turn the school around, but that has not happened,” she wrote.
St. Elizabeth formed a task force in 2008 to turn around the trend. Pushing for a 180 enrollment goal in Sept. 2009 and 270 by 2015, and hoping to recruit widely among Catholic families in the southern end of San Francisco, the task force worked with Archbishop George H. Neiderauer, the Alliance Consultative Board, Father Suan and Principal Dabdoub.
Despite the efforts of the task force, operating costs continued to exceed income from tuition, fees, fund-raising, parish contributions, archdiocesan subsidies, tuition assistance and funds raised through the Alliance of Mission District Schools. Expenses outpaced income during each of the past four years, resulting in a growing debt.
In May 2006, the school secured a $92,875 zero-interest loan from the archdiocese to cover teachers’ pensions, medical insurance, property insurance and other costs for the 2006 fiscal year. The school’s debt includes not only the full loan amount but also $190,000 in subsidies in the last three years.
“The resources of the parish and the archdiocese to subsidize St. Elizabeth School have been exhausted,” Huntington wrote.
In a Feb. 10 note to the school community, the St. Elizabeth administration noted the enrollment challenge.
“Last year we worked extremely hard to increase our enrollment,” the note said. “I thank each family who stayed with us and those new families who joined our school community. All of us know that our school is a special place with a lot of heart.
“As we look forward to the 2010-2011 school year, enrollment continues to be our challenge. We need everyone on board to spread the ‘good news’ about St. Elizabeth School, the school with ‘heart.’”
Huntington said St. Elizabeth faced a combination of changing demographics and the economy.
“They just weren’t able to get families to come into the school in sufficient numbers,” she said. “I don’t think there was anything that wasn’t tried. They made a concerted effort to boost the enrollment.”
According to a history of the school on the St. Elizabeth website, Father Arthur J. Cantwell became pastor of St. Elizabeth in 1942. Under his leadership, the parish transformed the dream of a school into a reality. Parishioners helped with a bazaar, social events and fund drives. On Dec. 11, 1949, St. Elizabeth School and Convent, at a cost of a half-million dollars, was dedicated in a ceremony conducted by Archbishop John J. Mitty.
The school was visualized as an ideal combination of school, auditorium, parish hall and cafeteria. Today, its extensive plant includes nine classrooms, three resource rooms, a computer lab, a library, administrative offices, a faculty room, an auditorium and stage, a special education room, an extended care area, parish and school kitchens and a gym.
In the archdiocese, and nationally, St. Elizabeth is far from alone in facing daunting financial and enrollment challenges.
A decline in the number of U.S. Catholic schools reflects a demographic shift of where Catholics live more than a decline in the demand for Catholic education, the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate in Washington, D.C., concluded in a 2006 survey.
CARA researchers linked the closure of 339 Catholic schools in the five years before the survey to the dynamic that “Catholic people move, schools don’t.”
The closure of two Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of Minneapolis-St. Paul, announced last month, illustrated the trend. School officials cited low enrollment and rising debt. One school faced a dramatic change in neighborhood demographics, with a resulting drop in enrollment and donations and a rise in financial need.
In the Archdiocese of San Francisco, a 2009 consultant’s draft report for the Department of Catholic Schools put it this way: “A great concern for all schools is the declining presence of the middle class, heretofore the ‘backbone’ of the Catholic School.”
K-12 enrollment in in the archdiocesan schools was 25,186 in September, down 1,836 from five years earlier.
K-8 enrollment in Catholic elementary schools within the Archdiocese of San Francisco fell by 361 students from September 2008 to September 2009, a drop of more than 2 percent in the midst of a severe recession. Nonetheless, this percentage drop in the number of students was less than that seen in other northern California dioceses. A number of other archdiocesan K-8 schools have enrollment below 200, but many have resources that St. Elizabeth lacks.
“Because a school is under 200 doesn’t mean it’s vulnerable to close,” Huntington said. “There are a whole bunch of other factors that contributed to St. Elizabeth that aren’t factors at other schools.
“Why would you close a school that was able to manage on its own?”
By Rick DelVecchio
From March 5, 2010 issue of Catholic San Francisco.
