The Diocese of San Diego announced the closure of St. Michael Academy at the end of the school year in June. The preschool will remain open.
The staff, home parish and Office for Schools had struggled for years to halt declining enrollment, a trend exacerbated by the pandemic.
The diocese is offering the academy’s families a financial package to encourage them to attend nearby Catholic schools. And it has offered to place as many of the teachers as possible in other Catholic school communities.
The elementary school in San Diego’s Paradise Hills neighborhood had seen a 32-percent decline in enrollment over the past four years, and a nearly 50-percent drop in 10-year period. A total of 78 students were enrolled in the kindergarten to eighth grade in the current school year, down from 108 in the 2017-2018 year.
The pandemic appears to have had a substantial impact on enrollment at the preschool. A total of 35 students were enrolled in preschool in the last school year. In the current one, the number dropped to 13, partly due to a distancing requirement from the county’s public health order.
“In recent years, the diocese has invested substantially in the ‘Next Gen’ educational model as a means of improving quality, innovation and attracting new families,” said John Galvan, the director of Schools for the diocese, in a letter to the parents announcing the closure. “Unfortunately, our efforts to stabilize St. Michael’s have not been successful.”
The model he referred to is a three-year project that added resources and technology to classrooms to strengthen teachers’ ability to meet the individual needs of students.
He noted that St. Michael’s Parish and the diocese did not have the capacity to subsidize the school any longer. In the 2019-2020 year alone, the school was running a deficit of around $2,700 for each student. Significantly raising tuition was not an option, he said.
He noted that the make-up of the neighborhood around the school has changed over the years, with the corresponding Zip code having less than half of the total number of children as nearby areas.
In his letter, Galvan stressed that the decision to close was not a reflection on the parish’s pastor, Father Manny Ediza, and the principal, Veronica Dayag.
“St. Michael has been a wonderful parish school for many years,” he wrote. “It is not a reflection of the value and quality of a Catholic education. Generations of children from Paradise Hills and surrounding communities have benefited from the values and lessons taught there.”
By contrast, many Catholic schools in the diocese are having to form waiting lists until the distancing requirements are lifted.
The above comes from a Feb. 24 article in the Southern Cross, diocese paper of San Diego.
Get used to stories like this. And then prepare for similar stories about parishes closing and merging.
The US Catholic parent faces a double ‘whammy’. They pay taxes for public schools, which they don’t use. Then they pay tuition for a Catholic school.
Catholic schools have just gotten too expensive for most families to afford.
This is true. 20 years back when we were lookng at Catholic schools we found them to be not very Catholic. We ended up going with a Christian school because they were at least semi reliable orthodox as I would come to understand.
Sometimes that is your best option but…
Can. 1366 Parents or those who take the place of parents who hand over their children to be baptized or educated in a non Catholic religion are to be punished with a censure or other just penalty.
Sorry, Anonymous– there are especially strict canonical penalties and punishments for immoral, heretical, apostate schools operated by the Catholic Church. Let’s see you dig up and quote them. Keith w Petersen and his wife did a great job as caring, Catholic Christian parents.
Anon. I was not criticizing him and I am aware of Can. 1366 because I had no Catholic school available to me and had to get permission to school my kids in a non-Catholic school after homeschooling for as long as I could.
It really was not a great decision but we still feel it was better than the public schools.
Sometimes your best option is not a good option.
I did not find any canon laws about immoral, heretical and apostate schools operated by the Catholic Church. I am willing to be informed.
This is a personal anecdote. Friends and family members whose children attended Catholic schools’ virtual classrooms over the past year have been disturbed by both the quality and quantity of education their children received. The top complaints were that the teachers gave two-hour reading and math assignments, and that was it for the day; day-in, day-out. The students were on their own with virtually no interaction or input from the teachers. This may well have happened in the public school sectors also, but it is a hard pill to swallow when parents are paying top dollar to have their children educated at Catholic schools and then being left to fend for themselves. I think it is important that Catholic school principals and teachers undergo performance evaluations by parents. This grading system would include a full year’s evaluation to date, and the results should be made available to the Diocesan director of schools for publication.
You should make the superintendent of schools aware of this. You should acknowledge that you are not directly involved, just passing on information. Don’t tell them how to fix it. You probably will not hear back or will get a ‘thank you for bringing this to our attention” or even excuse making. But something will be done or at least discussed.
@ Anonymous 4:32 pm – You make valid points. To continue with this anecdotal evidence, I also know that many parents have already notified the Diocesan Office for Schools. The responses were quite astounding: You parents should have notified your schools’ principals first, before notifying the Diocese! If these parents had notified the school principals first, then it’s not a stretch to imagine that the complaints would have remained on the principals’ desks and not seen the light of day. It now seems as though this particular Diocese is playing possum with the parents. My guess is that nothing will be done until the Diocesan office for schools notices a sharp drop in enrollments.
Silent Observer, well, they could have emailed the principal and copied the Diocesan Office for Schools. And the first complaint should have gone to the teacher. Perhaps, they did.
You are not trying to rat someone out or get someone in trouble. You are trying to inform all those responsible of a important issue with the service they are providing..
I probably “Karen”ed it a bit by asking to see the manager.
Thanks for your reply.
This zip code, according to the article, has had a significant decline in the number of school-age kids. This is not unusual. Across the country, particularly in cities, and also in rural areas, the number of kids is declining. Once, there was an ethnic or national parish on every corner. After three generations the grandchildren have moved out of the city, so those parishes are no longer needed. In many burbs the parishes are growing and expanding facilities. In some states, the number of school-age children has declined by the tens of thousands. This is not so much a religious issue as a demographic issue. We are in the midst of an explosive worldwide migration of people – from continent to continent, from country to country, from state to state, from rural to urban and from urban to rural.