By Liz Bowie and Kelly Brewington , liz.bowie@baltsun.com and kelly.brewington@baltsun.com|December 05, 2008
A 5 percent drop in Catholic school enrollment this year will leave the majority of the Archdiocese of Baltimore's schools in serious financial trouble, according to Archbishop Edwin F. O'Brien.
O'Brien said he would convene a summit of priests next month to consider innovative ways to combat the continuing decline in enrollment in schools from Western Maryland to the Eastern Shore. The summit will consider higher tuition, consolidations and school closings, but O'Brien said the archdiocese will also look around the country for solutions
Although Catholic schools have been gradually closing for decades, the concern became more acute a few weeks ago when enrollment figures were collected from the schools that serve nearly 20,000 students in primarily kindergarten through eighth grade.
Overall, enrollment is down 5 percent, the equivalent of 1,200 students or four full schools. That is twice as great as the steady 2.5 percent declines in past years. The problem was most acute in the city, where the loss was as great as 7 percent, and less so elsewhere, where the decline was 3 percent to 4 percent. The economic downtown has been a factor in the decline, O'Brien said.
By the end of the school year, the archdiocese will owe an estimated $9.3 million for insurance premiums that it can't afford. O'Brien said the archdiocese will go into the red and will have to raise the money, perhaps by finding properties to sell.
"We don't want panic," he said yesterday. "We want everyone to understand what the situation is and then come to some just solution."
The enrollment declines fit into a national pattern, particularly in urban areas, where the old neighborhood parish, founded by waves of immigrants years ago, has largely turned to educating children from poor, non-Catholic families. With fewer nuns and priests who had essentially worked for free, the schools had to raise tuition to pay staff.
Not all Catholic schools in the area are overseen by the archdiocese. Loyola High, Calvert Hall and Notre Dame Prep are schools in Towson that have many applicants and comparatively high tuitions and are not suffering under the same declines.
In Baltimore, parochial schools might be seeing increased competition from the city school system, which has opened a variety of charter and independently run schools in the past few years. This fall, 600 students were attracted to nine new small middle/high schools and younger students to a Montessori charter school.
