Padre Pio Academy to close

[Editor]

Archdiocese plans to close Hackensack Catholic school
Tuesday, February 12, 2013    Last updated: Tuesday February 12, 2013, 10:26 PM
BY  HANNAN ADELY
STAFF WRITER
The Record

HACKENSACK — The Padre Pio Academy, a Catholic elementary school, will close for good at the end of the school year, an archdiocese spokesman said Tuesday.


VIOREL FLORESCU/ STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Padre Pio Academy

The academy opened in 2009 on South Main Street after St. Francis of Assisi School merged with Holy Trinity. But Padre Pio faced the same problems as those two schools: low enrollment and slumping revenue.

“The Padre Pio Academy will close at the end of this year,” said Jim Goodness, spokesman for the Archdiocese of Newark, which includes Roman Catholic parishes and schools in Bergen, Essex, Hudson and Union counties. “There have been meetings with the administration at the school. It’s the classic conditions of rising costs and continued declines in enrollment.”

The planned closing is one of many that have affected Catholic families in the region, who increasingly choose to send their children to public schools for financial or other reasons. That’s led Catholic leaders across the state to close dozens of schools in the past few years.

But some faithful remain committed to Catholic schools for the religious environment that they say imparts morality, discipline and academic rigor. Padre Pio parent Joseph Valdivieso said he was “disappointed and saddened” by news of the closing. He plans to keep his two sons in Catholic school next year if he can find another in the area.

“I love the school,” said the Maywood resident. “I love the teachers. I love the whole Catholic school system. I went to Catholic schools.”

But enrollment woes have plagued local Catholic elementary schools in recent years. Padre Pio’s predecessors, Holy Trinity and St. Francis, had a combined 484 students in 2000. Eight years later, the enrollment at both schools had dropped to 301, Goodness said.

When it opened in 2009 as a preK-8, Padre Pio Academy had 151 students; now it has 119.

Tuition at Padre Pio is $4,650 a year, according to the school’s website. The cost of educating each child is $6,245, Goodness said.

“Very clearly, this is a case where there are fewer and fewer students each year to be educated and the deficit that the school has been running has been consistently high — at least $200,000 a year,” Goodness said.

This year, the school was expected to operate with a $347,000 deficit, he said.

The cost to educate a child in elementary Catholic schools is roughly half of what it costs to educate a child in public schools. Catholic leaders have lobbied the state to create vouchers that residents could use to pay tuition at religious and private schools, arguing that such a move would also benefit taxpayers.

But critics counter that it is wrong to use tax dollars to promote religious messages.

The archdiocese and the Padre Pio school administration had been meeting in the last couple of weeks to talk about the school’s future. The leaders “looked at everything to see whether it could conceivably turn things around,” but were unable, Goodness said.

The principal, Crystal Tober, declined to comment Tuesday.

The projected enrollment for the next school year was just 89 students, Goodness said.

“You can’t keep a building operation going and offer a good quality program when you only have that number of students to share the expenses,” he said. “That would become far too prohibitive for any parent.”

Students will be guaranteed a place in a Catholic school next year, but the choice of school is up to the parent, Goodness said.

No one feeder school has been designated for the displaced students, some of whom now will be displaced more than once in the course of their grade-school education.

First-grade teacher Jessica Rivera said she felt sad for the children.

“The kids have a place they feel part of and that’s being taken from them,” she said.

But, she said the matter was out of their hands.

“You just have to heal and move on,” she said.

Erica Stuart, whose 4-year-old daughter Aanaiyah attends Padre Pio Academy, said the school was “amazing.” Her daughter was learning a lot, she said, and could already write her first and last name and numbers up to 20.

Still, she was hoping to enroll her child at a local charter school in September instead.

“I didn’t plan on keeping her there [at Padre Pio] even though I do love it,” Stuart said. “For financial reasons, I was going to take her out.”

Email: adely@northjersey.com
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Related Topic: Holy Trinity School closes

[just watching]

Unfortunate.  The big mistake was merging Holy Trinity into the new Padre Pio.  Had they made Holy Trinity into the Padre Pio, and instead closed the school in the First Ward, the Catholic church may have been able to hold onto ONE Catholic elementary school.

I'm not playing Monday morning quarterback here.  Lots of people made that observation when the decision was made back in 2009, but the church authorities didn't listen.

Or better yet, let's take it one step further. Our Lady Queen of Peace (OLQP) school in Maywood should have been kept open at all costs. That's the one that really could have survived. They could have merged one of the Hackensack Catholic schools (St. Francis) into OLQP instead of closing OLQP, and if necessary they could have later merged the second Hackensack school into OLQP.  Instead they wound up closing all 3 schools, and in the reverse order from which the decision should have been made.

[Editor]

Padre Pio Academy students rally to save Hackensack Catholic school
Thursday February 14, 2013, 6:55 PM
BY  HANNAN ADELY
STAFF WRITER
The Record

HACKENSACK – Students at the Padre Pio Academy are rallying to save their school just days after hearing it would close for good in June.

The students are writing letters to public figures and have started a Twitter hashtag, #SavePPA, to raise support. They say they’re willing to raise funds if it would help keep the K-8 school open.

“I love it here,” said seventh grader Tania Jaramillo. “I’ve been here since I was 4. To think about not graduating from here is terrible.”

The Archdiocese of Newark announced Tuesday that the school would close because of declining enrollment and slumping revenue. The school, a product of the merger of St. Francis of Assisi and Holy Trinity schools in Hackensack, opened in 2009.

Seventh grader Joseph Barreto, who went to Holy Trinity, said he didn’t want to be displaced again. He’s tweeted the archdiocese with his concerns and said students had written to Ellen and Oprah asking for help.

“We want to finish our eighth grade year here. We’ve worked so hard,” said Barreto, who has taken his concerns to Twitter.

Because of the closing, he expects to go to public school in September, he said.

Some parents said they’d look for another Catholic school because they like the religious education, discipline and small class size. But choices are growing slimmer in the Catholic school system, where closings have become common.

Padre Pio is the last Catholic school in Hackensack. City families intent on staying with Catholic elementary education would have to travel to schools in neighboring towns such as Bogota, River Edge and Hasbrouck Heights.

The archdiocese is expected to hold an information session later this month so families can learn about other Catholic schools in the region, said spokesman Jim Goodness.

Some parents also said they would rally to keep the school open. Some have called church and government officials and plan to write letters.

The school has 119 students in grades K-8, Goodness said. Some parents said they wish they’d known sooner about the school’s financial straits so they could try to help. More students attend pre-K, but many leave to attend kindergarten elsewhere, he said.

Goodness said parents could already see the class sizes growing smaller around them, and already did frequent fundraising.

Tara Jones said she was upset about the closing, but will find another Catholic school for her two children even though financially “it’s a huge sacrifice.” She said her son has done so well since transferring to Padre Pio from a public school.

“I see the difference,” she said. “They hold kids accountable for every little thing, even for a missed comma.”

Email: adely@northjersey.com

[Editor]

Across North Jersey, Catholic schools are serving a smaller flock
Sunday, April 21, 2013    Last updated: Monday April 22, 2013, 6:01 PM
BY  TATIANA SCHLOSSBERG
STAFF WRITER
The Record
   
Padre Pio Academy in Hackensack will close its doors this year, following Assumption Academy in Emerson, which was shuttered in 2012. The Archdiocese of New York plans to close 24 schools in June.

And nationwide, nearly 150 Catholic schools will close this year, a troubling trend for the church in America. The effects ripple through communities as schools and the parishes that support them lose members.

For example, Paterson Catholic High School closed three years ago, buckling under the pressures of declining enrollment and a weak economy. Its closure was one of many in the Paterson Diocese, which since 1999 has shuttered schools across Passaic, Morris and Sussex counties.

“Paterson Catholic had become part of the community, and had a major impact on this city,” said Assemblyman and former Paterson  Councilman Benjie Wimberly, who used to coach football at Paterson Catholic, once one of the region’s largest Catholic high schools. “You can’t replace that.”

In the Archdiocese of Newark, which oversees Bergen, Hudson, Essex and Union counties, there are now 104 Catholic schools, compared with 176 in 2000.

Several challenges facing the church, in addition to a faltering economy, help to explain why so many schools are closing. Society is more secularized and there is a decline in the churchgoing population. The priest sex abuse scandal has kept the church in the news — and in court — for many years. And there have been demographic shifts in America’s Catholic landscape, including immigrants who are Catholic but who do not put a priority on a Catholic education.

“Fewer and fewer people are going to church now,” said Jim Goodness, spokesman for the Newark Archdiocese, “and fewer and fewer parents are sending their children to Catholic schools.”

That means less tuition. And despite the Catholic Church’s legendary wealth, on a local level it doesn’t have the cash to close the gap in individual parishes. And if regular operating costs, such as maintenance and teacher salaries, are being covered by deficit spending, then the parish starts talking about closing a school, Goodness said.

Leased buildings

If a school’s finances are in trouble, the discussions about closure begin at the parish level, Goodness said. If the parish administration can’t see a way to keep a school open, it will make a formal request to the archbishop to close it. Once that decision is made, the diocese will often look to lease the building to a non-profit or a public school, Goodness said.

For instance, Paterson Catholic High School now houses Grades 7-12 of the Paterson Charter School for Science and Technology.

“Our hope is that schools return and that people will come back to schools that might have closed,” Goodness said. “Or we can get multiple uses for buildings. Even though the Catholic school might not be there, we can use the building for religious education.”

If a Catholic school is used by the municipality, the building can help preserve a sense of community and have a lasting purpose beyond parochial education. School officials in Hackensack are in negotiations with the Archdiocese of Newark to lease Padre Pio to the city for use as an early childhood education center, starting in September. Here are other examples:

•In 1996, New Concepts for Living Inc., a non-profit that provides housing and services for disabled adults, acquired the Immaculate Conception High School in Hackensack in a lease-purchase agreement for $1.375 million with the Archdiocese of Newark. The building is now home to the George Washington School, a branch of the non-profit Youth Consultation Services. The building is currently undergoing renovation following extensive damage during superstorm Sandy.
•In 2012, St. Cecilia’s Catholic school in Englewood was leased to the city for five years from the archdiocese, at a total of $1.8 million.
•St. Mary’s in Dumont has been shared by Dumont, Bergenfield and New Milford since 2007 as the Bergenfield Alternative High School/Middle School for students with autism and special needs, at a cost of $7,000 per month.
•Sacred Heart School in Clifton was leased to the city of Garfield for three years, at $350,000 per year, starting in 2011.
•Cliffside Park began leasing Epiphany Elementary in 2005 for $150,000, in the first year of the lease. It is currently home to the Head Start/Early Head Start Administrative Offices.
•Saints Cyril and Methodius in Clifton was leased to the school district in 2001, for $100,000 a year, as a home for the first grade and bilingual kindergarten for School 12.

The closure of a big Catholic high school, or several Catholic schools in an area, can hurt public school districts.

“When schools close, whether they’re charter schools or Catholic schools, we get kids going into already-overcrowded schools,” said Irene Sterling, president of the Paterson Education Fund, a not-for-profit that works with the community to help improve education in Paterson.

“Historically, the Paterson school district has tried to lease those school buildings, which often works out so that kids still get schools, we get to use the buildings and the church gets the income to support other ministries,” she said.

Sterling said she sees a sense of loss in her community.

“Schools are very unique places — when a school closes, even if somebody takes over that building and the kids stay or the families stay, the community is different afterwards,” she said.

Lure of free education

With fewer parents choosing Catholic education for their children, because of financial reasons or growing disillusionment with the church over the sex abuse scandal, times remain challenging for the church. Goodness and his counterpart in the Paterson Diocese, Richard Sokerka, say they recognize that fact.

One of the main problems is the economy, which has many parents forgoing a Catholic education when they can choose a public school. “Nothing beats free,” Goodness said.

Goodness, Sokerka, and Catholic school teachers and superintendents said that they don’t believe the cases of priest sex abuse have had a significant effect on parents’ decisions on what schools to choose. Goodness also said that settlements in the abuse cases did not divert resources from Catholic schools or other ministry services, such as tending to the poor.

Aside from the economy, demographic shifts in North Jersey and in the American Catholic landscape have posed some problems for Catholic schools.

In place of the Catholic immigrants who came to this country, and to New Jersey, at the turn of the 20th century from countries such as Ireland, Poland and Italy, Goodness said, “now in some places, like Hudson County, an area that may have been traditionally one ethnic group that was Catholic has changed to two or three ethnic groups that are not even Christian.”

Or, some immigrants who are Catholic — coming from Latin America or Asia — are often used to state-sponsored education, religious or not, and might be unable to afford a Catholic education, Goodness said.

Another challenge is that many new immigrants are sending a lot of their money back to the old country to support family, Goodness said.

In an earlier America, anti-Catholic sentiment was a powerful social force and drove many Catholics to take their children out of public schools and put them into Catholic schools where they would be among their own kind, and likely to succeed, without voices of discrimination around them, Goodness said.

However, some parishes and schools have long been making a concerted effort to include Spanish-speaking Catholic immigrants in their communities. For instance, the Newark Archdiocese sometimes uses madrinas, or “godmothers” — members of a particular congregation who speak Spanish — to seek out families who they think might be interested in a Catholic school, but are disconnected from the community by language and unfamiliarity.

Goodness said that in Newark and Jersey City, “outreach to people in the mother tongue is very strong,” and often effective. That speaks to the church’s willingness to adapt to its changing population, which is welcomed by members of the Hispanic community, and may prove to be even more fruitful, given the election of Pope Francis, the first pontiff from Latin America.

Email: schlossberg@northjersey.com

[hackscoop]

Another take on the matter

http://hackensackscoop.blogspot.com/2013/04/superintendent-presses-on-with.html

[just watching]

I would like to make a few observations.  It's not going to get any better.  There's still a huge supply of senior citizens in the city's single-family neighborhoods. As they retire out of the city, pass away, or otherwise move on, that's more housing (old housing) available for young families.  Houses in Hackensack are now about 1/2 the value of the same house on same lot size in northern Bergen County. This means more and more families with kids are coming. Homes in Hackensack are falling into the lowest and 2nd lowest percentile, and that is a big problem (see item 3, below).

(1) Crack down even more on housing code violations with the intent of reducing student population.  Organize sweeps of the older neighborhoods and root out illegal bedrooms in attics and basements, and illegal conversions of 1 to 2 family homes (or 2 to 3 family). And over the decades, the city has allowed a lot of the Pre-war (1939 or older) multi-unit buildings to deteriorate and become lower-end housing.  Especially around Anderson Park, the SW corner of Beech & 2nd, and various properties owned by Nigito Realty all around the city.

(2) Establish historic districts where possible to increase prestige, increase property value.  This means less houses going to young families, in the long run

(3) Keep a careful eye on new development.  The number of bedrooms doesn't matter so much as the percentile distribution of the housing stock.  Calculate the percentiles for all 1-bedroom housing in Bergen County, meaning top 20% rent value, the next 20%, and so on to the lowest 20%.  Units in the top 20% will have very few kids (i.e. Prospect Ave highrises), and the families with kids will be swarming into the lowest 20%, with the mother (or both parents) sleeping in the bedroom and the kid in the living room, or vis versa.  Same for 2-bedroom and 3-bedroom apartments, and houses of 3 and 4 bedrooms.  The more that Hackensack ALLOWS current or new housing to fall into the lowest or 2nd lowest percentile, the more kids there will be.  Shoot for the higher percentiles.

(4) Last option, consider converting the M&M Recreation center into a school. In fact, that is the site of the former Broadway School. Use the M&M building as a gymnasium, and build a new school around it, including condemn the illegal contractor yard to the east. The one that has expanded and expanded for decades, and nobody raises an eyebrow.  The city can make a new more centrally located Rec center.