By Gretchen Keiser

Because of continuing enrollment difficulties and financial shortfall, the school at St. Paul of the Cross parish will be closed at the end of the current school year.

The decision was reached by the archdiocese recently, and teachers at the elementary school in northwest Atlanta, whose contracts were due for renewal March 30 under archdiocesan policy, were notified on that date that their contracts would not be renewed for the 1990-01 school year.

A letter to St. Paul’s pastor, Father Thomas McCann, CP, from Archbishop Eugene A. Marino, SSJ, formally notifying him of the decision was delivered April 3.

The parish has been staffed by the Passionist Order since it was erected in November 1954 and the school building belongs to the religious order, but the school is under the governance of the archdiocese.

In January 1990 the all-black school was serving 127 children in kindergarten through seventh grade, according to Sister Roberta Schmidt, CSJ, secretary for education for the archdiocese, while the archdiocese’s educational consultants have recommended that schools serve at least 300 students a year to continue to be viable. Fewer than 25 of the students are Catholic.

Figures provided by Sister Roberta Schmidt indicate that the school has served fewer than 200 children annually throughout the 1980s, with a high of 192 enrolled in the 1986-87 school year.

A task force at the parish level has been looking at viability issues, the school’s office said, but no new ways have been found to improve enrollment. The archdiocese has been bridging financial difficulties at the school this year.

Archbishop Marino said that he felt sorrow over the decision but that the archdiocese could not assist financially and was already using its limited resources to assist Catholic schools serving a poorer population.

Efforts are being made by the Office of Education to work with the teachers to assist them in finding other positions in Catholic schools of the archdiocese and with the students whose families wish to transfer them to other Catholic schools, Sister Roberta Schmidt said.

All of the 13 other elementary schools of the archdiocese are accepting registrations for the coming school year, she said.