Paulette Thigpen refuses to send her 11 -year-old son Reuben to a public school, where she's afraid he'll have to deal with gangs. So Thigpen, who lives in the Grand Boulevard neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, spends $1,700 a year to send Reuben to St. Elizabeth's, the local parochial school. She pays the tuition, though she's not Catholic, and though it stretches the family's budget.
But Thigpen is about to get a break. And so, in a way, is her son's school.
In fact, Reuben is one of more than 250,000 children who attend private schools and whose families could benefit from a new Illinois law allowing parents to receive tax credits for at least part of the cost of tuition and other expenses at elementary and secondary schools.
The credit, signed by the governor last summer, can be used to help offset such costs at any school. But Thigpen, and other parents who send children to private schools, are more likely to spend the minimum $250 a year to become eligible for the 25 percent credit on their income taxes.
Representatives of the Catholic Church of Illinois in particular promoted the provision among lawmakers last spring as a way to help parents in the parochial system and, by extension, the schools their children attend. Proponents even billed the credit as a solution to a "financial crisis" in the church's 593-school system.
There is no doubt Illinois' Catholic school system is facing financial difficulties, especially in parishes with high unemployment and few families who can pay the cost of a parochial school education. (The average tuition at a Chicago Catholic school, for example, is $2,189 per year.) When fewer families can afford
to pay, fewer schools can afford to
keep their doors open. As a result,
the Chicago Archdiocese has closed
153 of its schools over the last 35
years because, church officials say,
they could no longer afford to run
them. Among the schools in the most
recent round of closures was the
century-old Our Lady of the Angels
on the city's near Northwest Side.
There is no doubt, too, that
parochial schools play a significant
role in educating this state's children.
In the Chicago metropolitan region
alone, the Catholic school system
constitutes the largest alternative
to public schools. In the city and
surrounding Cook County, there are
394 registered nonpublic schools, 270
of which are Catholic schools. (The
majority of the remaining schools
are affiliated with other religious
groups.)
Yet, if Paulette Thigpen and St.
Elizabeth's, Reuben's school, manage
to find some immediate relief in the
tax credit, Illinois' new law is unlikely
to halt, or significantly slow, the
decades-long financial slide of this
state's parochial school system.
That's because the problems that
beset Catholic schools are rooted in
social shifts far larger than any one
family's struggle to come up with the
tuition money or any single school's
budget constraints.
The legislative effort did highlight
a significant issue. And it is this: The
Catholic school system is in decline
in the most impoverished regions of
Illinois, namely the older neighborhoods of Chicago, the entire city of
East St. Louis and the tiny towns
that dot the rural reaches of southern
Illinois. And just as declining
property values have eroded the tax
base for public schools, poverty has
drained the most significant sources
of revenue for the Catholic schools:
tuition and parish support.
The Chicago Archdiocese is by far
the largest in the state, and has the
largest Catholic school system in the
nation, encompassing both Cook
and Lake counties. But it tracks with
a pair of nationwide trends in the
Catholic school system: dropping
enrollments and shuttered schools. In
1965, there were 539 Catholic elementary and secondary schools in
that archdiocese. Today there are
317. Three closed their doors at the
end of the last school year. (The
Illinois Issues November 1999 / 37
The movement of families
out of the city and into the
suburbs over the past three
decades drove this decline
of Chicago's inner-city
parishes, as it has elsewhere.
number of churches has slipped in
that period, too, from 455 to 378.)
The movement of families out of
the city and into the suburbs over the
past three decades drove this decline
of Chicago's inner-city parishes, as it
has elsewhere. Many of those who left
the city were Catholics who took their
tuition money, as well
as their weekly contributions
to the parish,
along with them. Some
of those families chose
to send their children to
highly regarded suburban public schools.
Others helped to bolster
the Catholic schools in
their new hometowns.
Meanwhile, the
archdiocese has
struggled to subsidize
the education of those poorer students who were left behind in inner-city parishes, Catholic and non-Catholic. It's an overwhelming task.
The 12-year-old Big Shoulders fund-raising program, as one example, generates about $2.5 million a year to pay
the tuition of families who fall below
the federal poverty level, which in
1998 was $16,450 a year for a family
of four. About 3,000 students use the
scholarships in any given year, but for
every student who receives a scholarship, as many as three others are
turned down.
Significantly, while the program
helps individuals, it does not solve
the parishes' endemic poverty or
the schools' long-range financial
problems. "The dilemma," says Elaine
Schuster, the archdiocese's superintendent of schools, "is that in certain
areas where we really want to be and
stay, and where we really feel we have
a mission to be there, that's where
we're having trouble."
And more Chicago Catholic
schools are likely to close. "We've
been fighting the inevitable for a long
time," says Doug Delaney, executive
director of the Catholic Conference
of Illinois.
It's the same story in the bottom
third of the state. The Belleville
Diocese stretches from the St. Louis
Metro-East area through southern
Illinois, another economically
troubled region. Shuttered coal mines
and shrinking towns have taken a toll
on that diocese's school system. The
number of schools has dropped from
61 in 1975 to 40. And more closings
loom.
Tom Posnanski, director of education for the Belleville Diocese, points
to another factor in the financial
difficulties faced by Catholic schools:
rising teacher salaries. This, too, is the
result of social shifts. Over the last
three decades, fewer people have
chosen the church as a vocation, and
Catholic schools have had to rely on
more and more expensive lay
people to fill administrative and
teaching posts. Even as the number of
women choosing to become nuns has
steadily declined, those who remain
are much less likely than in the past
to go into teaching. Sister Dale
McDonald of the National Catholic
Education Association says more
options have opened for nuns over the
years, and many have chosen to work
in other areas of service, including
counseling and health care. In the
Chicago Archdiocese, for example,
the number of teachers and administrators who are nuns, brothers or
priests has dropped from 6,839 in
1965 to just 509 today.
And this trend has put an additional crimp in the budgets of Catholic
schools. Doug Delaney of the
Catholic Conference says the church
pays the room and board costs for the
nuns, brothers and priests, while lay
teachers must be paid salaries. And in
an effort to compete with public
schools, parochial schools have begun
raising those salaries though they
still aren't comparable to the public
system. Catholic schools teachers,
according to Delaney, earn about half
what they would if they were teaching
in public schools, and some, especially
those in affluent DuPage County,
earn a third as much. Still, any
increase in costs for Catholic schools
puts pressure on tuition, often for
those schools serving families who are
least able to pay.
Not all of Illinois' Catholic schools
are strapped. The Peoria Diocese is
adding a new high school in Cham-
38 / November 1999 Illinois Issues
paign. And the Rockford Diocese is
in much the same shape. "Our trend
has been growth," says Sister Patricia
Downey.
But the demographics of those two
dioceses tell the story. The Rockford
Diocese stretches from the Fox River
to the Mississippi River, encompassing a large portion of the northwest
Chicago metropolitan region that is
in the midst of a population boom. It
includes McHenry County, the
fastest-growing county in the state.
The Peoria Diocese, on the other
hand, is stable because its residents
have stayed put. "We have a lot of
schools that are in sort of out of the
way places," says Melvin Kuhbander,
superintendent of the Peoria Diocese.
"They have a long history, and the
parish is able to provide for them."
The report from two other Illinois
dioceses is both good and bad. The
Joliet Diocese has lost eight of 77
schools since 1975, but now enrollments are generally increasing. The
Springfield Diocese has lost nine of
72 schools during that same period.
But because of widely divergent
enrollment levels within that diocese's 28 counties, school superintendent Rose Mercinger is reluctant to
suggest a trend.
But if some parochial school
systems are doing OK, are Catholic
schools closing in areas where they
are needed most? A 1997 study by
Derek Neal of the University of
Chicago seems to imply that is
the case. Neal found that African-American and Hispanic students who
attended urban Catholic schools were
more likely than public high school
students to graduate from high
school, and were more than twice as
likely to graduate from college.
And here's another question. If
inner-city Catholic schools are worth
protecting, who should be responsible? Juliet Orlet-Schoen, a Belleville
parent of four students in Catholic
schools, believes the church should
do more to fight declining enrollments. "Local churches don't have
the vision of what Catholic schools
could be," she says. "I think the church
needs to start updating itself. They
need to wake up and see the gem that
we have here, see the vision that we
could have more."
Church officials argue, though, that
they're doing all they can. The Chicago
Archdiocese says it spends about $10
million for grants to keep schools in its
poor neighborhoods afloat.
So is it the public's responsibility to
help support religious
schools? Even a modest
tax credit has raised
concerns about the constitutional separation of
church and state and
the fair distribution of
public education dollars.
Last summer, a teacher
and a parent filed a
legal challenge to the
tax credit in Franklin
County, one of the
poorer regions of
southern Illinois.
Is it the public's responsibility
to help support religious
schools? Even a modest tax
credit has raised concerns
about the separation
of church and state.
There are other concerns as well.
"If all the demands of the public
schools were met," says state Sen. Art
Berman, a Chicago Democrat, "I'd
be more receptive to supporting non-public schools."
Even at that, the causes of the
financial decline of some of Illinois'
parochial school systems may be
beyond the reach of government, or
the Catholic church. "I think a lot of
it is demographics," says Melvin
Kuhbander, the Peoria Diocese
superintendent. "Almost invariably,
closures and growth are due to
population shifts."
Still, many Illinois parents will
continue to opt out of the public
system. Paulette Thigpen believes her
son's Catholic school provides a
better environment for learning.
"Their discipline is much better, and
they have smaller class sizes." But
academics are only half the story.
For Thigpen, the idea that there is an
alternative to public schools is an
important one. The problems she
hears about in the nearby public
schools worry her.
"I don't think my son would be an
A student if he went to the public
school," she says. "He'd be watching
his back all the time."
Margaret Schroeder, a free-lance writer,
lives in Springfield.
Illinois Issues November 1999 / 39
