More than 8,300 children are expected to enter the doors of the 26 schools in the Archdiocese of Atlanta when they reopen on Wednesday, Aug. 31. This will be the largest enrollment ever recorded by the Catholic system.

Although students begin on Wednesday of next week, their teachers will actually have been at work two days earlier. This year two faculty workdays have been included in the calendar at the opening of school. Teachers will report for the first time on Monday, Aug 29, and Tuesday, August 30. Two other workdays have also been included in the year’s calendar; one at the semester break in January, and one at the very end of school.

Principals and teachers will use the time in preparing their year’s work, and in setting up their classrooms. Faculty meetings will be held at the schools, and departmental meetings will be held at the high schools. The Orientation Program for teachers new to the elementary schools of the archdiocese will be held in the cafeteria of St. Joseph High School on Tuesday, August 30, from 9 a.m. to noon.

Father Daniel J. O’Connor, secretary for education for the Archdiocese of Atlanta, said pre-registration shows record enrollment at all three of the diocesan high schools, and at Marist and D’Youville. St. Pius has closed its enrollment at 740; St. Joseph expects to close to 350 to be present at opening day, with a record freshmen enrollment of more than 135. Drexel Catholic High School, which showed an enrollment of 138 last year, has pre-registered 160 students for the current year.

Marist School has over 500 students compared with the 466 enrollment last year and is putting new applicants on a waiting list.

“Many, but not all, of the parochial elementary schools have been forced to close their enrollment due to filled classrooms,” Father O’Connor said. “Parents still trying to place their children in parochial schools are urged by the Department of Catholic Education to try their own parish schools first to see if the particular grade they are interested in is filled, and then to apply at any other schools they can provided transportation to.” More than 300 teachers will fill the classrooms of the archdiocese again this year. The exact figure last year was 328 teachers. Of these 19 were priests, 157 were sisters, and 152 were lay teachers. In the high schools of the archdiocese last year, there were 51 lay teachers and 42 religious, indicating the rapidly swelling numbers of lay men and women in Catholic schools. In the elementary schools, however, teaching sisters filled over half of the classrooms with 109 sisters to 91 lay teachers.

To give an indication of the money saved local school districts by Catholic educational effort, Father O’Connor estimated what it would cost to educate these children if they went to public schools in DeKalb County.

He said the Department of Education in that county estimates that it costs more than $308 in tax money to educate each student in the DeKalb System. For 8,300 students this would amount to $2,556,400. Using the figures released by the City of Atlanta, $375 per student, the cost would total $3,065,700.

“The fact that Catholic parents have undertaken the cost of educating of their own children, besides supporting the public schools through their tax dollars, indicates their continuing willingness to make great financial sacrifices to obtain for their children that unique education available only in the Catholic grammar and high school,” Father O’Connor said.