Enrollment in Hampton Roads’ Catholic schools bucks national trend

VIRGINIA BEACH

While Catholic schools all over the country have been closing, South Hampton Roads has seen two open in recent years, and the diocese is exploring the need for more.

At some local Catholic schools, classrooms are so full there are waiting lists for certain grades.

All the seats in Susan Escobar's class at St. Gregory the Great School were filled recently as the fifth-graders played a Lenten version of Jeopardy.

Holy Week for 500!

The Agony of Christ for 500!

The boys wore green polo shirts and sweaters; the girls wore skirts, khaki pants or plaid jumpers.

Take away the SmartBoard, the classroom computers and the talk of uploading an assignment to the Web, and the scene could have been out of a Catholic school of 40 years ago. That's when Catholic education reached its enrollment peak.

The number of students attending Catholic schools nationwide has been cut in half since the 1960s. But in South Hampton Roads, many schools still boast of full classrooms.

Catholic schools here have just 89 fewer students this year than they did in 2002, a loss of 2.4 percent.

That's about the same enrollment decline experienced in local public schools and much better than the nationwide Catholic school decline of 13.2 percent.

Some local schools, including St. Gregory the Great and St. Patrick in Norfolk, have waiting lists for several grade levels.

"We had people sleeping in their cars to register before we expanded pre-K and kindergarten" in the mid-1990s, said Nancy Wakeham, director of admissions at St. Gregory, the largest Catholic school in Hampton Roads. The registration process has been more orderly since then, she said, but demand is still high in the youngest grades.

Local Catholic education is faring well for several reasons. One, school officials say, is the large military presence in the area.

More than 60 percent of St. Gregory's students come from military families, assistant principal Cathryn Whisman said. The school prays for a different ship each morning.

Another major reason is the 2005 opening of St. Patrick Catholic School in Larchmont, an independent Catholic school within the Diocese of Richmond.

The school was built with private funding from the Barry-Robinson Trust and serves the parishes of Sacred Heart, Blessed Sacrament and St. Mary in the western half of Norfolk. It is near capacity with 386 students, offsetting losses at Catholic schools elsewhere in Hampton Roads.

"Well over 90 percent of our students, we're their first time in a Catholic school," said Chuck McPhillips, a member of the St. Patrick board of directors, and chairman of the trust. He was among a small group that started planning for the school in 1999.

St. John the Apostle opened a school in 2002 in Lagomar that enrolls more than 200 students, and Catholic High School moved from Norfolk to Virginia Beach in 1993, which helped keep enrollments level.

"What we're finding is, of course, in areas people can more easily afford a Catholic education, it's more stable," said Annette Parsons, chief school administrator for the Diocese of Richmond. In the next ten years, the diocese plans to look into the possibility of a school in Chesapeake or Suffolk, which are both growing.

"We want to serve the Catholic populations where they are," Parsons said.

Annual tuition for South Hampton Roads Catholic elementary schools is about $3,000 to $6,000. It is about $10,000 at Bishop Sullivan, the area's only Catholic high school.

Bishop Sullivan Principal Dennis Price said last year that, as costs rise, some parents are opting out of Catholic education before their children reach high school.

And no matter the grade, student enrollment drops as tuition increases, Parsons said.

Nationwide, the hardest-hit schools are elementaries in inner-city areas with economic downturns, said Sister Dale McDonald, director of public policy and educational research for the National Catholic Educational Association.

That seems to be true in Hampton Roads where only Portsmouth Catholic has lost more than 25 percent of its students since 2002 and where St. Mary's Academy in Norfolk closed in 2002, a year after dropping grades 1 to 5. The school had opened in 1820.

Parsons said the diocese is committed to urban education and has begun a foundation that will start offering scholarships in the fall.

It won't be easy.

Catholic schools are striving to offer programs, facilities and technology similar to public schools, at great expense. At the same time, the number of priests, nuns and brothers who once cheaply staffed schools has shrunk to near zero.

"The challenges are great," Parsons said. "We're looking at ways to provide tuition assistance to families, so wherever they are, they can afford those schools." This past year, Catholic schools in the diocese provided $1.8 million in financial aid - but parents qualified for $3 million.

Catholic schools also have to perform academically if they hope to compete with public and other private schools.

Star of the Sea in Virginia Beach displays standardized test scores on its Web site. And St. Gregory proudly touts its status as a Blue Ribbon School, a distinction reserved for schools that are academically superior in their states or demonstrate dramatic gains in student achievement.

Academic success helps attract non-Catholics, such as Claudia Sparks, who sends two of her children to St. Patrick. "They're not teaching to the test," she said. Public schools are judged on how many of their students pass state tests.

Sparks said the gifted programs at St. Patrick have been better for her children than those in public schools.

But for many parents, the religious aspect is what has them enrolling their children.

"I look at the Catholic schools as someone who is helping me raise our kids Catholic," said Julie Long, whose four children attend St. Gregory.

For example, the children have learned to make the sign of the cross when an ambulance goes by. "That's not something I taught them," she said.

"I don't know that I could have done it as well on my own."

Lauren Roth, (757) 222-5133, lauren.roth@pilotonline.com