Continuing an annual winter ritual, the Archdiocese of New York and the Diocese of Brooklyn have announced permanent Catholic school closures for the coming year. The number so far is small: five in the Bronx, one in Harlem, and one in Brooklyn. More troubling, however, is that three of these schools—St. Mark the Evangelist in Harlem and Sacred Heart and Immaculate Conception in the Bronx—had been part of the most promising school-turnaround model in the country. That model was run by the nonprofit Partnership Schools, whose contract with the archdiocese ended last year.
The reasons behind New York City’s Catholic school closures are well known, longstanding, and depressing. In the five boroughs, enrollment in grades kindergarten through eight is down 42 percent since 2014. Enrollment in the Bronx is down over 50 percent. High schools are slightly more stable, with student populations down 20 percent, including a 30 percent drop in the Bronx.
The pressing question now for both Catholic educators—as well as federal, state, and local political leaders—is how to find a way to preserve what remains.
Along with the loss of its promising Partnership schools, the Bronx is taking another hit. All Hallows High School, which I profiled for City Journal in 2019, will close after 115 years. The school lost almost half its pre-Covid enrollment by 2024.
New York City’s long-running decline in Catholic school enrollment is irreversible. It is in part a byproduct of quality-of-life issues in both city and state, as families leave to seek opportunities elsewhere.
The growth of charter schools has also played a role. For decades, Catholic schools were the only alternative to failing public schools in poor and working-class neighborhoods. Charter schools, largely inspired by the success of inner-city Catholic schools, grew rapidly under Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Their taxpayer-funded budgets put competitive strain on the tuition-charging Catholic schools. While charters have been the city’s most successful education innovation over the past 25 years, Catholic and other religious schools still have a role to play.
In this gloomy environment, a small group of Catholic high schools stands out as having both a vested interest in the future of Catholic schooling and the expertise to leverage meaningful change. Today, over half of Catholic high school enrollment is concentrated in just 11 of the city’s 45 Catholic high schools. The largest is St. Francis Prep in Queens, with 2,400 students. Four other schools—St. Joseph by the Sea in Staten Island, Archbishop Molloy in Queens, Xaverian in Brooklyn, and Cardinal Spellman in the Bronx—serve between 1,100 and 1,500 students each. Fordham Prep, Xavier, Monsignor Farrell, Monsignor McClancy Memorial, Cardinal Hayes, and Holy Cross enroll more than 700 students each.
Many of these schools have made fundamental changes over the last 20 years to stay in the game. Molloy, McClancy Memorial, and Holy Cross were once boys’ high schools; they are now coeducational. Xaverian in Brooklyn added a middle school—a model that worked well in Nassau County, at Kellenberg Memorial. Fontbonne Hall in Brooklyn, a girls’ school, admitted sixth-graders this year in response to the closure of a nearby Catholic school. Mary Louis Academy in Queens is opening an all-girls middle-school program in September.
Each of these schools faces its own challenges and limitations, but some could use their administrative structures and expertise to form networks of middle or elementary schools to assist and strengthen the parochial schools in their areas. Kellenberg did this in Nassau with a failing elementary school. Other high schools should undertake similar efforts.
One thing is certain: traditional diocesan offices won’t be the ones finding the path of preservation. In Brooklyn and Queens, the diocese ceded control over parochial schools to lay boards in the late 2010s—an admission by the central office that it saw no way forward. And the archdiocese is now shuttering the three promising Partnership schools. The city’s remaining Catholic schools are largely isolated and focused (understandably) on their own survival. Many lack the resources and expertise needed for new thinking.
New York’s political leaders have a chance to do the right thing for these longstanding community institutions. Members of Congress could support a federal tax credit of up to $10 billion nationwide for contributions made to scholarship-granting organizations. New York’s Children’s Scholarship Fund is poised to take advantage of this credit, building on its current program, which provides more than 7,000 scholarships per year to New York schoolchildren. This program will not take money away from public schools.
In a perfect world, New York would join other states in adopting its own tax-credit scholarship program. That would be a heavy political lift, but as families flee the Empire State, common sense may finally prevail.
The Supreme Court will soon review an attempt to establish a religious charter school in Oklahoma, possibly opening the path for religious schools to receive public money directly without sacrificing their core identity. If that happens, New York State leaders would need to lift the cap on charter school openings to take advantage of it.
Without new thinking in the Catholic school community and enlightened political action, New York will become a less family-friendly state and the Catholic Church will see further losses. This outcome is still avoidable.
Photo by Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
