Braintree Catholic School Among Dozens Closing Nationwide

BRAINTREE, MA — Two Catholic schools on the South Shore have permanently closed their doors, partly as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

Catholic school enrollment across the United States has been declining for decades, but COVID-19 was the final nail in the coffin for St. Francis of Assisi School in Braintree, St. Jerome in Weymouth — and dozens of other Catholic schools throughout the country.

According to data compiled by the National Catholic Education Association, more than 5.2 million students attended almost 13,000 thousand Catholic schools in the early 1960s. Those numbers have declined steadily ever since, and today about 1.7 million students are enrolled in just under 6,200 schools.

Kathy Mears, the association's CEO, told Patch the enrollment decline began when Catholic families began moving to the suburbs and tuition began rising as laypeople took over teaching duties from nuns.

"We have to pay teachers a salary, and charge more tuition, and not everyone can afford tuition," said Mears, who spent five years as the school superintendent for the Boston Archdiocese. "Others choose not to."

The decline is accelerating as a result of the global coronavirus pandemic, she said. Some parents aren't re-enrolling their children because they don't know whether they'll have a job in the fall, and other parents don't want to pay for what very possibly could be online learning in the fall.

Worse, the virus also forced cancellation of spring fundraising events, which Mears said many Catholic schools rely on to meet their expenses.

St. Francis and St. Jerome are part of a much larger trend, she said.

"Braintree is not unique in that respect at all," Mears said. "Every day for the last four or five weeks, there's been at least one school closing.

The Effect On Parents

Families of Braintree's St. Francis were notified Tuesday of the school's closing in a letter from Father Paul Clifford, who cited the economic devastation stemming from the coronavirus as the reason for the school's shuttering.

"The realities presented by COVID-19 have had a disastrous impact on the school's financial situation and make it impossible for us to provide the safe, excellent, and value-based education you expect and deserve from our school going forward," Clifford wrote.

Parents said they felt blindsided by the announcement. Some said that if they had known about enrollment problems at St. Francis before COVID-19, they would have raised money to help the school keep going.

"If we had another year, we could have come up with a plan," parent Joanne Hernandez said. "We could have thought of other ways to create income."

Parent Serenity Belo agreed.

"If you have given us a heads up and said, ‘We're struggling,' we could have walked away and still failed, but we could have said we tried," Belo said.

As of Friday afternoon, nearly 1,700 people have signed a petition to save the school

Parent Kate Herbst said the closing could not have come at a worse time. She's now in a difficult position where she has to find a new school for her children in the midst of a global pandemic.

"We have to find a new school we can't even go to because of the pandemic," Herbst told Patch. "Some aren't even calling back."

What makes that situation worse is the stress put on the children who don't want to change schools, Belo said, noting that her daughter had trouble sleeping when she found out about the closure Tuesday night.

"In addition to what's going on politically, but also in people’s homes where people are losing their jobs and have all these stresses, the one constant has been these teachers giving these students exactly what they need," she said

Patch reached out to Thomas Carrol, the school superintendent for the Archdiocese of Boston for comment, and will update if we hear back.

Mears said she sympathizes with the frustrations of these St. Francis families.

"My heart breaks for the parents," Mears said. "There are more unknowns this year than ever before. Things we could know about a school last year have changed."

Mears said people didn't like it when she had to close schools while superintendent in the Boston dioceses.

"You don’t become superintendent wanting to close Catholic schools, but I do understand the frustration of the parents," Mears said.

"Catholic schools are gifts to the nation. We provide quality education and a choice for the parents.....When they close, a choice is taken away, it's a struggle."