Feature News

Two elementary schools closing

St. Joseph, St. Elizabeth of Hungary pastors cite finances, underenrollment

Friday, March 12, 2010
Angelique Ruhi-Lopez -

MIAMI – When Paul Hammett was a child, he longed to attend the school at his parish of St. Elizabeth of Hungary.

COURTESY PHOTO St. Elizabeth-St. Joseph School in Pompano Beach has seen enrollment drop from 530 students in 2003-2004 to less than 100 this coming school year.

“I always wanted to go there but my family couldn’t afford it, so I always knew I would send my kids there. When we finally could, it was what we expected it to be for our children: a great school, a great parish and a great environment,” Hammett said of his two youngest children, Lindsey, an eighth grader, and Daniel, a sixth grader at St. Elizabeth-St. Joseph School. (The name St. Joseph was added to the school last year after the parish merged with St. Joseph Haitian Mission in Pompano.)

This year will be the last that the Hammett children and all students of St. Elizabeth-St. Joseph will attend the 49-year-old school: Father Paul Kane, pastor, announced March 9 that the school will not reopen for the 2010-2011 school year, citing financial reasons and under-enrollment.

“We didn’t come to a decision overnight,” said Father Kane of the school, which offers pre-K4 through eighth grade. “We had 530 students enrolled in the 2003-2004 school year and we have had a steady and significant decline in enrollment since then. We currently have 160 students and only had 96 students enrolled for next year.”

St. Elizabeth was not the only school to announce in early March that it was closing its doors: St. Joseph School in Miami Beach also will close at the end of the current school year.

“We have been under-enrolled for 11 years now and during these years, there have been less than 200 children in our school,” said Father Enrique Estrada, pastor at St. Joseph.

In a letter to his parishioners, Father Estrada cited three reasons for the decision to close the school: the economy, low enrollment and demographic changes in the community.

“Everyone is devastated, including all the people who have walked our hallways in the past 53 years,” said Father Estrada. “It was a tough decision, but we needed to do it, in all fairness. I could not postpone this until May or June because families need to find new schools and teachers need to find new jobs.”

“These pastors and principals have left no stone unturned trying to see different ways to recruit more students, get funding, and pay down their debt, but each of them separately came to the conclusion that they couldn’t go forward another year without adding more debt to what they already had,” said Brother Richard DeMaria, director of Christian Formation and superintendent of schools for the archdiocese.

In the case of St. Elizabeth-St. Joseph, the debt accrued both this year and in prior years will rise to $1.3 million by the end of this school year. Some of that is owed to the archdiocese; more than $850,000 is owed to Bank of America, with principal and interest needing to be paid starting in July of this year.

“It’s painful to come to the point where you cannot operate a parish school due to insufficient resources. It breaks my heart,” said Father Kane, who became pastor of St. Elizabeth in August. “The school is a tremendous ministry of the parish and will be one that we will miss greatly.”

Father Kane said that many efforts were made to try to keep the school viable, including reducing expenses and eliminating teaching positions. A team of parents also formed a public relations and marketing committee to promote the school to the surrounding community through direct mailing, a 30-second commercial on Comcast cable, and appeals to potential donors for seed money to eliminate the school debt. An unprecedented five open houses also were held in an attempt to increase enrollment. These efforts were not sufficient to keep the school open, however.

“It’s just a sign of the times. Everybody is hurting and the numbers just don’t add up,” said Hammett, who said that his son, Daniel, will complete the seventh and eighth grades at St. Coleman School in Pompano Beach. “We’ve been at the school for years and years and for it to end on our watch is difficult. We will keep praying and hope that things will come back around.”

COURTESY PHOTO St. Joseph School has only 140 students enrolled.

Administrators at St. Joseph School had been forewarning parents since early 2010 that challenging times lay ahead.

“We have to be very blessed and extremely grateful for the level of commitment, dedication and the effort shown by Father Estrada and school principal Dr. [Maria] Chelala,” said Tery Howard, president of the Home and School Association at St. Joseph for the past three years. “They’ve gone beyond the call of duty to try to keep the school open. They’ve suffered through this and not all parents understand this. Although it’s a difficult thing for them, they’ve done everything in their power to keep the school open.”

Howard and other parents are trying to identify donors who can support the school in the hopes of being able to keep it open.

“We as parents want to make sure that we don’t leave any stone unturned and try to affect some way of turning this around, but it’s a difficult situation,” said Howard, who has had three children graduate from St. Joseph and whose fourth child is currently an eighth-grader at the school. “We cannot allow for our children to lose their Catholic identity, but at the same time, we have to respect the decisions that have been made. We have to find hope as Catholics that God has bigger plans on the horizon that we can’t understand.”

Father Estrada explained that the school is running a deficit and 80 percent of the parish’s $1 million budget goes toward salaries and benefits.

“It will jeopardize the parish in the long run if we don’t close the school now,” said Father Estrada.

Chelala, principal at St. Joseph for the past five years, said that the numbers speak for themselves.

“This year we’re providing 140 students an education but with loan advances from the archdiocese,” she said. “Neither the archdiocese nor the parish can really own up to continually pay every year a debt incurred with loan advances. It’s very sad. But at the same time, I’m grounded by the facts and reality of the numbers.”

“The parents are very disheartened, like mourning a loss of a relative,” Chelala said. “The hope is that someone can come up with a big donation. Who knows, maybe there’s a good soul out there who wants to help us. Parents are doing their best to find ways of helping the school. It’s all in God’s hands.”

Father Estrada invited the principals from the neighboring schools of St. Rose of Lima, St. Lawrence and St. Patrick to speak to St. Joseph parents about their respective schools.

“We’re doing everything we can do,” said Eugene Razzetti, chairperson of the finance committee at St. Joseph. “The principal has managed to locate other schools in this area who will take these kids. We’re looking to put fantastic teachers out there and hope other schools will hire them. The teachers here are taking the news with amazing professionalism. With our former students and teachers, we will be taking a lot of St. Joseph to the outside world and that’s a good thing.”

Brother DeMaria wrote a letter to all principals in the archdiocese asking them to give special consideration to hiring the teachers of these two schools. Though other schools in the archdiocese may be struggling financially, he said he does not expect any other schools to make the decision to close at this time.

“I worry that this wonderful thing we have, Catholic education, will become something only for the wealthy,” said Brother DeMaria, who attended a meeting with parents and teachers at St. Elizabeth of Hungary. “Listening to the parents at that meeting, you know that those parents are absolutely convinced that that school has created a home, a learning experience for their children.”

“The existence of parental choice programs (such as McKay scholarships and Florida PRIDE) gives us some help,” he added. “Right now, the parental choice programs don’t bring enough money to balance the (school) budget. If those were to increase, if the level of funding goes up, that gives us a light at the end of the tunnel.”

Related story: School closings began in 2008