Thursday, 4:30 PM
Brockton's Catholic schools to consolidate
By Michael Paulson, Globe Staff
BROCKTON -- In the first test of a new strategy for revitalizing urban Catholic schools, Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley announced Monday that, with the help of wealthy donors and a local college, he plans to replace the last three parochial schools in Brockton with one regional school located in two refurbished buildings.
Archdiocesan officials said the Brockton effort -- an attempt to respond to declining enrollment, inadequate financing, and older buildings -- is a model that the church also looks to implement in Dorchester and Lowell.
The model, in which a regionalized Catholic school will be governed by a local board of trustees approved by O’Malley, is a break with the decentralized system of parish-financed parochial schools that has characterized Catholic education in much of the United States for more than a century.
The new regional school will give up some autonomy in exchange for considerable investment of financial and academic resources. Stonehill College, a Catholic institution located in neighboring Easton, has agreed to help with curriculum development, teacher training, and administration through the college’s Center for Nonprofit Management.
Suffolk Construction has agreed to renovate the two school buildings, and to build an addition for one of them, at cost. And businessman Jack Connors Jr. -- the chairman emeritus of the advertising firm Hill, Holliday -- is leading a committee aiming to raise about $14 million to finance the project.
"Brockton is one of the poorest cities in the state, yet these families are looking for a faith-based, values-supported Catholic education," Connors, the chairman of an archdiocesan panel looking at the long-term future of Catholic education, said in a telephone interview. "One of the things so many of these Catholic schools have in common is financial trouble and resource famine, so all we’re really trying to do is introduce the haves to the have-nots. It’s a movement to bring some of the more wealthy resources of our faith to the neediest parts of our faith."
Enrollment in Eastern Massachusetts Catholic schools has plummeted by more than two-thirds over the last four decades. There are now about 50,000 students in the schools of the Archdiocese of Boston, 31,000 in elementary schools and 16,000 in high schools, down from 153,000 in 1965.
The costs of running Catholic schools have skyrocketed, as the decline in the number of nuns and priests, who worked essentially for free, has required the schools to hire salaried laypeople, and as Catholic schools compete for pupils with schools that have better athletic facilities and technology.
