Laura Weeldrier, deputy chief of staff in the city schools, said that while she has no firm data she has heard anecdotally from parents and principals that significant numbers of parents are moving their children from parochial to public schools. The Montessori school, she said, drew many children from outside the public school system.
Currently, 9,000 students attend public charter schools in the city.
In Western Maryland, one Catholic school has announced that it will close at the end of the school year. St. Michael in Frostburg, which has operated for 110 years, has about 85 students in grades pre-K through eight.
"St. Michael is like a family. It is a wonderful school," said Mollie Lawrence, the parent of two students there. Last year, she said, the school developed a five-year plan to increase enrollment. "I don't think that we were given the opportunity to try all the options. ... We are devastated."
When asked whether he would close other schools, O'Brien said, "Anything is on the board. The last resort would be to close a school." Any closings or consolidations would not be likely, he said, before 2010.
O'Brien made public the extent of the problem in an open letter to Catholics that was published in the Catholic Review last week.
O'Brien said the archdiocese will probably seek aid from the General Assembly in its next session. This year, a bill was introduced that would have given businesses a 75 percent tax credit for contributing to a nonprofit that provides tuition to students at nonpublic schools.
O'Brien acknowledged that it was a poor time to seek any financial support in the legislature but said that the state saves $1.4 billion a year in education costs because of the role that the archdiocese schools play.
Another solution, one that has been tried in Washington, is to convert some Catholic schools into public charter schools. But he said there might be legal constraints in Maryland.
For many parents, sending a child to a parochial school has long been a family tradition. When Chuck and Lisa Brawner's son was ready to enter kindergarten there was no doubt where the couple would send him to school. Chuck Brawner attended St. Thomas Aquinas in Hampden. His father went there. And his mother was a bookkeeper there, a job she kept since he was a boy.
But news of financial struggles facing schools in the Baltimore Archdiocese has the Brawners worried that their neighborhood school of three generations in the family might not survive.
