(The following “position” paper on Catholic schools’ financial crisis and the possibility of state aid was written by Father Daniel J. O’Connor, archdiocesan secretary for education.)

Catholic education faces a very definite financial crisis. It is not our problem alone; public schools too have very serious money problems. Unlike the public schools, however, the problem could be fatal to excellent education, or even good education, then the schools will provide poor education. We cannot do this. Catholics will not pay high tuition for poor education, only for good or excellent education. So you can accurately describe the situation caused by the financial strain on our schools a crisis. It could cause the demise of the Catholic school system as we have known it here in Georgia, and in the rest of the country for the past seventy-five years.

The effects of this financial strain is already apparent. In the 1950’s, when the Catholic Church began to expand at a rapid rate here in Atlanta, the school was always the first building to go up in a new parish. Church services were held in the auditorium or cafeteria. In the last five years, in contrast, four new parishes have been erected, and there is no thought of building a school.

Two of these have built very elaborate catechetical centers, and one is just starting theirs.

The unwritten policy of the archdiocese then is to build no new schools, but to try to keep the ones we already have. Like the Catholics around the country, we are fighting what might be called a holding action.

There is no single cause for the financial crisis; it is the result of an accumulation of events and circumstances. Inflation is certainly one cause, but it is far from the most serious. I suppose the Vatican Council could be pin-pointed as the most important single factor. It began the renewal in the Church that we have all heard so much about. This rethinking of goals and purposes, and the changes it has brought into the Church has caused a sharp decline in the number of women in the religious life. This decline still continues. The vacancies left in our school staffs by sisters leaving the religious life must be filled by lay men and women. Fifteen years ago, the number of lay personnel in our schools was negligible; now, here in the Archdiocese of Atlanta, over half of our elementary school teachers are lay people.

The Catholic school system as we knew it was built upon the teaching sister. She dedicated her life to teaching. She felt that it was the most important task in the Church’s mission. Because of her vow of poverty, she needed only the minimum of financial support. Higher education was not a problem, she learned to teach by teaching.

Now all of this has changed. The lay teacher who has replaced the sister must be paid a salary that is at least competitive with the public school salary. And she must receive at least some of the fringe benefits that the public school system provides. And even the cost of maintaining the teaching sister has almost doubled in the last five years. She too needs insurance and pension plans today. And she must receive higher education, to at least the master’s degree.

But there is more to it than just the decline in the number of religious women. The whole purpose of the Catholic school has been critically assailed by many members of the Church since the Council. The system was begun in the last century to preserve the faith of the immigrants that were pouring into this country. They lived in their own ghettos. The public education that was available to them was often hostile to their faith. So their bishops had the schools built to protect their faith.

But all of this has changed. And so, many ask today, why keep the schools? The great majority of Catholics are no longer poor; they do not live in big city ghettos anymore, but in the suburbs, where the quality of public education is very high. And religious women ask, why should I dedicate my life to teaching the affluent when I could be teaching the poor, who need me so much more, and who can’t get quality education in their ghetto schools? Or they ask, why should I be teaching the language and arts and the secular sciences, when I should be teaching religion? These children can get the arts and sciences in the public schools, but only the Church can teach them the gospel of Christ.

And so Catholics find ourselves debating the need for the schools, which are a great financial drain upon our parishes, and we wonder if we need them any longer. And religious women debate the validity of the teaching apostolate, when they have so many new apostolates open to them. There are other causes of course, but I would say that these are the most important.

Surprisingly enough, the effect of all this change and debating, has been very positive on our schools. When your very life is threatened you fight much harder. And this has led to a great improvement in the quality of education in our schools.

In the last five years, we have closed six schools, but only one of those has really been closed because there was not enough money to keep it going. That was Our Lady’s Day School which was a small school for exceptional children. We evaluated it and found its program inadequate and decided that we did not have the funds to provide what we considered an adequate program for these children. Two of the schools, Sacred Heart in Atlanta, and Immaculate Conception in Atlanta, were downtown schools whose student population had simply become too small to provide economical and adequate education. At Immaculate Conception, too, the land that the school rested upon was taken over by the city for the park now being built in front of the Capitol. Drexel High School was closed because it was a bad idea from the beginning, and it never reached 50% of its total capacity in the six years of its existence. The remaining two, St. Gerard School in Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, and D’Youville Academy here in Atlanta were closed because the religious orders that staffed them could not continue to do so. The decrease in their own numbers made this necessary, not the inability of the parents to pay for the education in each school.

So we have fewer schools than we did five years ago, but for the most part it is the smaller and weaker school that has passed from the scene.

Our enrollment has dropped sharply, too. In 1967 we had enrolled in our schools 8,395 boys and girls in both elementary and secondary schools. Today this has shrunk to 7,115 pupils, a decline of 12%. But this too has been beneficial. We are seeking to have all our schools accredited by 1972 by the Southern Association, and so all of our schools have made a conscious effort to reduce the pupil-teacher ratio to the Association’s standards. We no longer have 50-55 pupils in a room now, as was often the case during the 1950’s.

Now the great majority of our teachers are degreed and certified. Just five years ago, less than half of them were.

And every parish now has a board of education composed of laymen and women, who with the pastor and principal, decide the policy for the school. This is all new within the last four years, but a vast improvement, because the policy-making base of Catholic education is now much broader than it has been in the past. Since we are making decisions that effect the Church’s teaching mission, it is very important that the whole Church participate in the decisions. This again is an effect of the Vatican Council.

All of these changes are, at best indirectly, connected with the financial crisis. Because we have fewer religious teaching, we have greater expenses; because costs are higher, tuition must be too; because we must charge higher tuition, we have made every effort to improve the quality of education in the schools, and broaden the policy-making base for all of Catholic education. All of these effects have been positive. I do not have the least doubt in my mind that the quality of education in every one of our schools, is far, far superior to what it was just a few short years ago, an even then, with rare exceptions, it was not poor.

The crisis has also caused another change, and that is the amazing improvement in the quality of religious instruction, both in the schools, and in the parish schools of religion, which is what we call our “Sunday schools” now. This improvement was caused by the fact that we were forced to analyze the very reason for existence of the schools. If we are to operate religiously-oriented schools, then the schools must provide the very best religious education.

In the old days, everyone taught religion. It didn’t matter whether they could, or wanted to, or were qualified to. Now only specialists teach religion, and they are doing it with a professionalism and enthusiasm that was previously unknown. They have the assistance of instructional materials that were not available only a few years ago.

Moreover, because fewer of our children are in Catholic schools now, and are therefore, receiving all of their religious instruction in the parish school of religion, we have been forced to divert personnel and financial resources to this area.

This has always been our weakest area. The children attending public schools have often been treated as second-class citizens. Too often pastors felt that if parents were good Catholics, they would be sending their children to Catholic schools. Since they didn’t send their children to our schools, they didn’t deserve too much attention anyway.

All of this has changed. Where, just four years ago, we had in the archdiocese over 350 fulltime teachers in our parochial schools and diocesan high schools, we did not have one full-time person in catechetical work. Now we have a central Office of Religious Education with four full-time staff members. In addition almost every single one of our large parishes in the Atlanta area has a full-time religious education coordinator. The majority of these men and women have master’s degrees or are working on master’s degrees in religious education. Much of their effort is directed not toward children but adults. Literally, they are causing a catechetical revolution, and one, that I believe will cause a profound change in Catholic parish life as we have known it.

Concerning ways to meet the financial crisis, there is only so much that we can do. We have no control over some of the factors, such as the decline in the number of teaching sisters, but we are taking some steps. The most important is to put our schools under sound financial administration. Right now we do not really know what they are costing us. This is because the schools are financed locally, in the parish, and there has been almost no centralization.

This year in the archdiocese we are going to make a very complete study of our costs, and project them for the next five years. Then we are going to install a uniform accounting system.

If we know what the schools cost, and what they will cost in the future, then we can make intelligent decisions on our ability to keep them going. Each parish will be able to decide on the amount of subsidy they give to the school, and what tuition they will have to charge parents using the school. This did not use to be a problem, but today, with only 40-50% of the children in a parish attending the school, it becomes very important.

Our schools have never been private schools in our own minds. They have been open to any Catholic child who lived in the parish. But now that tuition is rising to a point where many parents cannot afford to pay it, we have to face the fact that they are becoming private schools. They won’t be strictly private as long as the parish or the archdiocese continues to subsidize them, but the serious questions are how long can we continue to do this, and to what extent, and why? We are being forced to reassess our goals. Why have schools, anyway? The Church puts up to 60% of its finances into Catholic education. Is this too much? Could we not spend this on the poor, the aged, the sick, the mentally retarded, or one hundred other ways? Or is it best spent on education? This is the debating going on in the Church right now.

I would personally prefer to see the Church remain in Catholic education as long as it possibly can, even if we become more private than public Catholic schools. The Catholic school is a unique institution. I think that it has been around so long, and doing its work so well, that many people in the Church simply take it for granted.

The schools are a tremendous asset to the Church; one wonders if any amount of religious education in the parish outside the school situation can possibly fill the school’s role. The school does not just impart knowledge of faith; it actually raises a child in a Christian community. If this formation is carefully and professionally molded, the end product should be an informed and articulate Christian, who can fill the responsible roles that the modern Church demands.

But such a person is not only an asset to the Church; he becomes a valuable citizen to his nation as well. So the Church is contributing not only to its own welfare, but to the total community. Could she make a more valuable investment to either society? In our schools we add a moral and religious dimension to education that public schools cannot. And if we can do this well, (and I feel that we are doing it better now, than ever before), then I think that many Catholics will continue to make the financial sacrifices necessary to give this education to their children.

This brings up the question of tax-support for our schools. Are the schools important enough to the welfare of the state or nation that they deserve the support of tax money to keep them in existence?

Frankly, in Georgia, we do not expect to receive public money to keep our schools open. Catholics are less than 3% of the total population and political support would be impossible to obtain for such a controversial question. But there have been breakthroughs on the federal level, and in various states. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1966 saw tax money going indirectly to private schools for the first time. The bill was worded in such a way as to avoid the constitutional question of church and state separation that was so long a barrier. And that compromise was reached only because the need for federal assistance was so great that the compromise had to be reached.

On the state level the same is true. Financial considerations are forcing the issue. At least six states have passed legislation that provides tax support for private schools. In Ohio, for instance, over the next two years $49 million dollars of tax money will be given to private schools for teacher salaries, and other areas. But in Ohio there are over 350,000 children in Catholic schools; in New York, over 800,000 attend Catholic schools; in Philadelphia, over 250,000 or 50% of all children attend Catholic schools.

Quite frankly, if these close, there is a distinct probability that the public school system would go bankrupt. The states have almost been forced to keep the Catholic schools open.

In Georgia, the situation is far different. There are approximately 15,000 students in Catholic schools here. If over the next five years our schools should be forced to close, the financial burden on the state and counties would be substantial, but not catastrophic. A county like DeKalb would feel the effect. We have over 3,000 students in Catholic schools in DeKalb. At $500 per student, it would cost the county over a million and a half dollars each year to educate them, and this would not include the capital expenditure for new classrooms to house them. But very few other counties or cities would feel the effect as drastically, so it would appear there would be very little support for financial assistance outside of the Catholic community itself.

And yet there are good arguments for it. For instance, there is the effort to introduce driver’s education into all Georgia’s high schools. The legislature will evidently be asked to make money available for this purpose during the upcoming assembly. This money would be provided only to public schools. Yet it doesn’t make much difference if you are run down by a public school or a Catholic school graduate. Textbooks, guidance and counseling services, and the like are all areas where Catholic schools have received state support in other parts of the country. It is done on the child-benefit theory, and it makes sense. These are services that all children need today, no matter where they go to school. The state is going to have to provide them to Catholic children if our schools close; why not provide them now while the schools are open? It would be cheaper in the long run.

This brings up the whole question of private education. Not counting the Catholic school system, private education in this country has always been the privilege of the wealthy. The public school system has become a monopoly, and because Americans dislike the idea of monopolies, I think that the years ahead will see concerted efforts to destroy this monopoly. You can see this happening in the South already where the integration of public schools is causing the rapid increase of the “new line” private schools. In New York City the impasse caused by the teachers’ strike also brought up the idea of semi - or wholly private schools for ghetto neighborhoods as a possible solution, and this by respectable educators. Race is not the only issue, although it is the most important one in the South. The Supreme Court’s ruling on the unconstitutionality of praying in public schools was as big an issue. And as the public schools’ problems grow, when the problems of discipline increase, or when the curriculum becomes a matter of controversy, as it has been over sex education -- the questioning of a single public school system is bound to increase.

Right now Americans have no real choice, and Americans do not like that. There can be no real choice if you have to pay for the privilege of private education above and beyond your tax dollars. Catholics have been doing this for years, but now it is becoming increasingly difficult even for us to keep us with the rise in costs.

Within the past month Governor Maddox lent his backing to private schools. He listed all the arguments: local control, healthy competition for public schools, prayer and religious instruction, and the like. Segregation - the one benefit I’m sure was foremost in his mind, he didn’t mention. He suggested that the state give families grants of $100 for each child they placed in private schools.

It is easy to see why public educators fear the idea. It would mean the collapse of public education in the state, or at least a state of anarchy for many years. I personally don’t see how it could possibly get through the courts. Certainly Catholics could not support such a plan, even if it would help us solve our financial problems. We have had problems with integration ourselves, and appreciate the dilemma facing the public schools.

Outside of the segregation issue, however, the other arguments are valid, and I believe that what is happening in the eastern states is setting the stage for great changes in American education. If Catholics can operate their own schools with state assistance, then others can too. Private industry has shown increasing interest in the problems of education within the past ten years. If it decides to enter the scene, and if parents can use their education dollar anyway they wish, we could be in for a major revolution in the next thirty years.

I feel that whatever system provides children with the best education is the one that is going to be used. Education is too important for it to be any other way.