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By Gretchen Keiser, Staff Writer

ATLANTA-The archdiocese and the Department of Catholic Education, working with the pastor and staff, have authorized a parish school at St. Catherine of Siena Church in Kennesaw this fall. The school will use existing religious education classrooms and will open with kindergarten through third grade. There will be two sections of each grade. In a process initiated by the Department of Catholic Education, Father Jim Harrison, pastor of St. Catherine of Siena, has been meeting with archdiocesan officials since Oct. 1, 2001, to work out details in the model, which is unique in the archdiocese. When the archdiocese approved the project in late January 2002, he said, "We don't want to just have a school. We want to have a really good school." St. Catherine of Siena built a new religious education facility with 24 classrooms in the 1990s, said Father Harrison, a former principal of St. Pius X High School, Atlanta, who also worked for 24 years in Cobb County schools. "I've seen Catholic schools in my lifetime that didn't have nearly the facilities we have, and they were very good schools," Father Harrison said. Father Harrison said the parish also conducted a feasibility study to assess parental support for the school and the project had to be approved by archdiocesan financial bodies. He said he had suggested parish buildings be considered for a Catholic school in the late 1990s, when the archdiocese learned land chosen on Post Oak Tritt Road in east Cobb County had factors that precluded its use for a school. Judith Mucheck, superintendent of Catholic schools, said the Department of Catholic Education "has the mandate from the archbishop to expand the school system." At the same time, she said, expanding by building new regional schools "is cost-prohibitive to families." This fact of life "forced us to look at other models," she said. "At the same time, we knew of pastors out there that had large parish facilities that the pastors perceived of as being underutilized." The school is projected to start with 17 to 20 children in each classroom and to become a K-8 school. Two new sections of kindergarten will be added each year as the oldest children progress to eighth grade, Mucheck said. "It is much more gradual, with much more controlled growth," she said. "It can be monitored for financial stability . . . If there are problems along the way, they will be much easier to follow." Opening new K-8 regional schools with all grades in one year, as the archdiocese did in 1999, "was very, very difficult," Mucheck said. A five-member parish search committee has been established by Father Harrison to hire a founding principal. The school will have to be self-funded, as is the case throughout the archdiocese because of the indebtedness assumed by the Department of Catholic Education to build and open five new schools in 1999 and 2000. At the same time active Catholic families will be able to apply for tuition assistance from a fund maintained by the archdiocese for this purpose. This model is more economical because it is not necessary to start by building a new school from scratch, Donald Sasso, executive director of educational funding, pointed out, or to fully staff a K-8 school at the outset. Tuition is estimated to be $4,900 a year, said Stan Ford, parish administrator. When the archdiocese looked into building a new school in west Cobb County in 2000, the tuition was estimated to be over $6,000. That project was shelved. Mucheck said St. Catherine of Siena property is located in the city of Kennesaw and the project readily received the necessary zoning approval from Kennesaw. A key to the model is that the school will seek accreditation from the Southern Association of Independent Schools (SAIS) rather than the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS). SAIS only began offering an accreditation program in 2000. Archdiocesan schools are now SACS-accredited. "It is a key development which has really allowed us to give serious consideration to this model," Sasso said. SAIS accreditation is "more flexible" with school facilities than the accreditation program for SACS, Sasso said. SACS accreditation standards "are much more restrictive than the new SAIS accreditation standards," which are designed for independent schools, he said. "It is allowing independent schools to design a program that is unique to the independent school," Sasso said. Rita Bek, director of religious education at St. Catherine of Siena, said she believes there will be no difficulty filling the new school. "People are hungry for a good Catholic education," she said. "Many are going to St. Joseph's in Marietta for that reason. We are hoping to solve some of that hunger for Catholic education." In a parish of over 3,000 families, with over 1,500 children in the parish school of religion, Bek said, "We've got the facility. The facility is here. Why not make more use of it?" Karen Pickens, director of the parish preschool program, said, "I believe this is going to be fabulous." A graduate of St. Joseph's School, and a parent of two children now studying there, Pickens said, "St. Catherine's is very much of a community. This elementary school program is going to complete it." Disappointed when the west Cobb County Catholic school plan did not go forward, Pickens said she believes this "gives the Cobb County area more hope." While her own children are too old to benefit from the new parish school, "I don't think they'll have any trouble filling it . . . This is a very, very young church with a lot of young families and a lot of new people to this area." The preschool has 212 children enrolled, including 80 who are 4- and 5-year-olds, she said. "All are age-appropriate to go on to kindergarten." "The opportunity it is going to offer so many Catholic families is fabulous. I think it is a good use of space." Ford said no adaptations of the building are necessary to open the school, but the parish will buy some school furniture. Eventually the school will utilize Herbert Hall, another parish structure, he said, but not in the first year of operation. "I am apprehensive, but very excited," Ford said. "The interest (in the parish) has been phenomenal." The Department of Catholic Education has no plans for the Villa Rica Road site where they had earlier proposed building a 1,000-student elementary and middle school. This parish school model diverges from recent models utilized by the Department of Catholic Education. For example, a regional school model was used to create St. Peter Claver in Decatur in 2001, in place of Sts. Peter and Paul School, a parish school. At the same time, parish schools were closed at Our Lady of Lourdes and St. Anthony's, Atlanta. Asked about Our Lady of Lourdes, where parents tried unsuccessfully to keep a parish school open, Sasso said, "basically there wasn't a financially feasible model in place at Lourdes." The school was a K-6 school "that was significantly under-enrolled," he said. "The facilities were substandard. There was not money available to significantly improve the facilities." Whether in creating St. Peter Claver, or in considering utilization of religious education facilities in Cobb County, he said, the goal is "providing Catholic education to as many students as we can in a . . . spiritually, financially feasible way." The approach is to "look at the individual situation" and try to find a model that will work in that situation, he said. What is being proposed for St. Catherine of Siena is "an untried model and an untried concept." Father Harrison said his experience tells him that Catholic schools can be effective without having state-of-the-art buildings. He recalls St. Joseph's School in Athens when the cafeteria was in a basement and a classroom was in the rectory. "This is a model which is being piloted on a very small scale, that has minimal risk and fulfills the archbishop's mandate," Mucheck said. "And from all the data we have right now, it is very feasible for people. It possibly could be a model that could be replicated in other parts of the archdiocese. We don't know that yet. We are going to move slowly." Families interested in applying to the school are asked to contact Stan Ford, parish administrator at St. Catherine of Siena Church, at (770) 428-7139.