Catholic high schools in the Boston area are vying for what school administrators call “curb appeal" to woo families in an increasingly fierce competition for prospective students. In multimillion-dollar makeovers, they’ve spruced up the inside and outside of their campuses. They’ve added gardens, outdoor sculptures, and circular plazas where students and teachers can gather, hoping to grab a significant share of a declining Catholic school enrollment.
“The quality of the facilities reflects the quality of academics, the quality of spiritual life," said Albert Shannon, headmaster of St. John’s Prep in Danvers, which spent $30 million over the last three years upgrading its sprawling 175-acre campus. “Curb appeal helps. It gets people in the door, to the extent that we are marketing."
Principals and admissions directors emphasize that gleaming, state-of-the-art libraries and science labs are not enough to lure students without strong teachers and personalized classroom settings. But renovations and expansions help attract families, they said, and have become necessary to keep up with other Catholic high schools as well as the prep schools and public high schools that students consider.
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In less elaborate makeovers, St. Mary’s High School in Lynn , formerly nicknamed “Hot Top High" for its asphalt campus, planted grass, trees, and flower gardens last year; it also added new classrooms and a lecture hall. To combat rumors of the school closing, Matignon High School in Cambridge just completed a $500,000 renovation to the façade of its red brick school building, adding an awning to create a covered walkway and replacing chain-link fences with granite bollards.
“We needed to do something to say to these kids that we are in business and we’re going to stay in business," said Howard Redgate, president of the board of trustees. The school enrolled only 40 students in the incoming freshman class and hopes to boost freshman enrollment to 120 students in future years.
At Newton Country Day School of the Sacred Heart, which has spent $25 million in renovations since 2001, school officials struggled with the question of whether to invest in new facilities or teacher salaries. The school added science labs, classrooms, and a theater. It bought an ice hockey rink, expanded its library to 10 times the original size, and now hopes to build an athletic center with multiple gyms.
“A lot of schools get carried away with the flash of it all, and in some ways, we all know we have to keep up with the Joneses," said Mary Delaney, the school’s admissions director.
I know nothing about these schools. I know nothing about the Catholic secondary school scene in Boston. I don’t know how many schools serving poor and lower-middle class students have closed over the past couple of decades. I don’t know what populations these schools spending millions on renovations are serving. Even most Catholic prep schools have generous financial aid.
And…the reporter writes the story. Who knows what he/she ignores, as Dom points out. And the fact is, in some subjects, upgrading is necessary – at the high school I taught at in Florida, we couldn’t even offer AP Chemistry because our lab didn’t have the proper (largely computerized now) equipment.
But with all that said – that was sort of depressing. Considering how ill-served so many poor, lower-middle class and immigrant children and young people are by public education. Considering that, although the Church has always educated the wealthy, the core of its educational mission has always centered on serving the poor – first. (The Piarists, whose sad story I blogged on last week, resisted the efforts of various nobles and Cardinals to get them to start schools for the wealthy – not always successfully, but they did resist.)
The environment is tough. The questions are complex. But this is not where the educational mission of Catholicism has found its power and strength and purpose, traditionally.
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