WASHINGTON — The National Catholic Educational Association is in the midst of celebrating its 100th anniversary of out-reach to Catholic schools and all forms of Catholic education, including parish catechesis and even seminary training.

But its largest significant constituency — parish and diocesan Catholic schools — is facing a crisis of numbers. According to the association, the opening of the 2002-2003 school year saw 140 fewer Catholic schools open in the country either because of closing or consolidation and 63,053 fewer students.

And what is even worse, admitted Michael Guerra, the association's president, is that there were probably 80,000 students who were affected by the closing of those schools. But he said 47 new schools opened as well and took on 20,000 or so students. A total of 8,000 schools with 2,553,277 students remain.

If the two-year trend of a loss of 2.4% of students per year continues, by the school year 2020-2021 there will be 970,000 fewer students in Catholic schools.

But Guerra is determined not to let that happen. “I don't want to preside over that kind of loss,” he said. Guerra, who has been the National Catholic Educational Association's president for almost two years, said he takes these numbers “as a wakeup call” that something must be done to stem the tide.

According to Guerra, the reasons for the decrease boil down to two: demographics and economics.

Like the general population, the Catholic population is very mobile, he explained. So some areas have fewer Catholics and others have more Catholics than was true a generation ago. Generally, that means Catholics have followed their peers out to the suburbs from the inner cities, leaving inner-city parishes with a shrinking and generally older membership still needing to support a school.

“We don't want to abandon the schools we have,” Guerra said, because they are in places “where oftentimes the Catholic school is an oasis.”

Economically, parishes can no longer rely on the funding model their schools ran on for most of their existence, Guerra said. Paid lay teachers have replaced the primarily women religious staff, dramatically increasing funding requirements. Parishes generally can no longer allow students to attend on very low or even no tuition.

The National Catholic Educational Association, which was founded in 1904 and boasts a membership of 200,000, lobbies in Washington for school vouchers.

Guerra maintains that Catholic schools have a value beyond the Church's boundaries. According to one estimate, they save more than $18 billion in taxpayer money annually, for example. The per-pupil cost in Catholic schools is between 25% and 50% less than what the average public-school student costs.

If you take away the economics question, Guerra said, parents will more than likely choose a Catholic school for their children. In cities where there are privately funded vouchers, two-thirds of the benefiting students are in Catholic schools. These programs, which offer vouchers by lottery, have 60,000 to 100,000 students currently getting the help. But, Guerra added, another 1 million are on a waiting list for it.

And in the two publicly funded voucher programs in the country, Cleveland and Milwaukee, the overwhelming majority of parents have chosen Catholic schools.

Home-School Challenge

But others question if economics and demographics are the only reasons for the drop in Catholic schools' enrollment. Outside of diocesan and parish-based Catholic schools, the numbers of Catholic home schoolers and private, independent Catholic schools are growing every year.

There are no firm numbers on how many Catholic home schoolers there are. They are increasing significantly, though, as evidenced by the number of regional home-school conferences cropping up around the country, said Mary Hasson of the National Association of Catholic Home Educators.

“Catholic home schools began as a response to the failure of Catholic schools in particular areas,” said Randall DeClue, director of marketing and program development at Seton Home Study, the largest provider of Catholic home-school curricula and materials in the country.

DeClue said it's been a combination of things during the last 30 years that has brought Catholic schools to where they currently are: the loss of women religious and the changing of texts in order to get public funding are the two major issues, he said.

“People were finding that students weren't maintaining the faith after leaving school,” he observed.

It is from the increasing ranks of Catholic home schoolers that many of the new, independent schools are coming, said Eileen Cubanski, executive director of the National Association of Private Catholic Independent Schools. Many of these schools, she said, are started by home schoolers who have banded together. At other times, the schools are started because the parents don't have the option to do home schooling.

Cubanski said the definition of an independent school is not independence “from” but independence “to.”

“We have independence to establish our own admissions, discipline, academic and other policies,” she said.

These schools do maintain ties with the local bishop, Cubanski said, and some have even been officially recognized by their diocese as being Catholic schools. Absent that recognition, the school will say that it is a private school teaching the Catholic faith.

National Catholic Educational Association's Guerra is cautious about both of these phenomena. He warns that a child's education cannot be a private affair governed solely by parents or private school boards but that the Church and even the community as a whole have some say in what a child is learning.

“We can't allow the parents unlimited freedom, because we want the child to be part of the faith community,” Guerra said.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that parents are the “first and principal educators of their children” (No. 1653) and that they have the right to choose a school for them that “corresponds to their own convictions … As far as possible parents have the duty of choosing schools that will best help them in their task as Christian educators” (No. 2229).

The Catechism also says the state “may not legitimately usurp the initiative of spouses” in the education of their children (No. 2372).

Todd Flanders, headmaster of the new Providence Academy in Plymouth, Minn., sees things in a different light from the National Catholic Educational Association chief.

“All of these movements in Catholic education are good,” he said of private schools and home schools. “We need to be faithful to the Church's magisterium first, but we also need to give people access [to Catholic education] and we need to be experimental in our approaches.”

Thomas A. Szyszkiewicz is based in Altura, Minnesota.