Parents scramble to find new schools for their children
Parents in Mott Haven are scrambling to find their children a new place in the school system now that the decision to close St. Jerome elementary on Alexander Avenue at the end of the school year is final.
At an emotional meeting at the school on Feb. 12th, parents said they were worried about sending their kids far away from home while their kids were worried about being separated form their childhood friends. The decision, announced Jan. 22, leaves hundreds of families searching for alternatives.
Click here for an interactive graphic with information about the choices and decisions parents have to make to choose another school for their children, including travel time and distance, tuition and services offered.
“The archdiocese didn’t set up anything concrete to help us figure this out,” said Danilo Cruz, whose two boys, seven and eight, have attended St. Jerome since kindergarten. “It’s been a shock, but this is reality.”
Cruz, his wife and children and about a dozen other parents gathered in the school’s cafeteria Tuesday night to hear from recruiters representing St. Paul School in Harlem. It was the fifth such presentation since late January, the St. Jerome parish secretary said.
Beatriz Sanchez, a mother of two students at the school, said she enrolled her children to teach them religious values after their old public school closed in 2011. She said she wants to keep their education Catholic if she can. Her daughter in kindergarten received more academic attention and her son, a sixth-grader, is developing a good social life.
“Now we’re in limbo,” she said. “He’s kind of sad. He made friends, so it’s kind of hard for him.”
The closure is part of a three-year plan to restructure the Catholic school system in the Archdiocese of New York, which covers Manhattan, the Bronx, Staten Island and seven upstate counties.
The plan, called Pathways to Excellence, will help the archdiocese save money by providing new revenue streams and consolidating operations into regional offices. Parochial schools will no longer be paid for solely by the parishes in which they are located but costs will be spread among the 2.5 million Catholics in the archdiocese through a new sliding school parish tax and administered by new regional boards. Money from the parish tax and the sale or lease of school buildings will be used to create an endowment from which schools with budget shortfalls will draw instead of getting subsidies from the archdiocese. Mott Haven is part of the South Bronx and Northeast Bronx region.
The Archdiocese spent $30 million to subsidize elementary schools in recent years.
It is closing 24 schools at the end of this academic year; 27 schools were closed in 2011. Of the 51 schools closed, 13 are in the Bronx.
“The Archdiocese wants to retain the money. This is just a business to them,” said Kelvin Ramirez, 33, a graduate of St. Jerome who now has a son there.
Ramirez was raised a Catholic and has a 12-year career as a teacher and administrator in Catholic schools. But he said he’s looking into public and charter-school options in the neighborhood.
“I don’t want to put my son in another Catholic school,” he said. “They don’t care about us.”
Fr. Gustavo Nieto, the pastor at St. Jerome parish, said that even though families will attend other schools, he expects many will still attend the church.
“The school has been part of the parish for 140 years,” he said. “Most of the people live in the neighborhood, and will probably continue to come here.”
Immaculate Conception School on 151st Street, Saint Anselm Parochial School on Tinton Avenue, St. Luke on E 139th Street and St. Athanasius on Southern Boulevard have also visited St. Jerome to make a pitch, said the parish secretary.
The challenge for parents is to find a new school that fits their child’s particular needs and has an opening. The Archdiocese of New York has guaranteed a parochial-school spot somewhere in the South Bronx and Northeast Bronx region for every child displaced by St. Jerome’s closing if they want one, and has waived entrance exams for St. Jerome students transferring to other parochial schools.
But each school has its own application process, many of which include a review of the student’s academic record, standardized test scores and teacher feedback.
Joseph Puglia, principal of St. Jerome has been distributing open house flyers and other literature from nearby schools. Despite recruitment efforts, ”it’s not an automatic placement,” said Puglia. “Some schools don’t have openings.”
The process presents some parents from the neighborhood with a confusing obstacle course to keep their children on a steady educational track. The Archdiocese has hired counselors to help them navigate the process, Fran Davies, a spokeswoman for the Archdiocese, said in an email.
She said the archdiocese will work with students whose applications are rejected from the schools of their choice.
Davies said the placement counselor assigned to St. Jerome, Juliana Riley, has reached out to parents through phone calls and visited the school for the first time last week. Riley’s Linked In profile describes her background as marketing for non-profit organizations.
“Her job is to keep the [enrollment] numbers up,” said Ramirez, the Catholic school administrator with a son at St. Jerome.
Riley did not respond to a request for comment.
Supporters of St. Jerome and Blessed Sacrament School in Soundview rallied in December to protest the closures. The head of St. Jerome parish came up with a fundraising plan to save the school, but the archdiocese never responded, according to parents and school administrators
“People are leery as far as putting their child in another Catholic elementary school,” said Puglia. “There is a lot of uncertainty about how long that school will last.”
St. Jerome will close its doors for good on the last day of school this year, June 19th.
About Post Author
