CATHOLIC GRADE SCHOOLS

...Though my childhood memories may be dismissed as impressionistic, anecdotal, and unreliable, it appears to be verifiable that Catholic schools provide something extra, in May of 1997, Greeley presented a research paper at a Catholic University of America conference on "The Future of Catholic Education" in which he contended that Catholics share stronger "community ties" than do Protestants, and that this "community ethos" is "but one aspect of the larger phenomenon of the 'sacramental' or 'liturgical' imagination...

...But NCEA's own research shows that despite these openings, "there is still a great demand for space--many schools have waiting lists...

...Saint Andrew's was a precious part of the Catholic community that completed the circle of faith formation begun in our home and nourished by our neighborhood church...

...Here's why: In Cincinnati, where ! now reside with my husband and two preschool-age children, our parish CCD has swelled beyond the numbers matriculated in our parish school...

...The sacramental imagination--itself a gift of a Catholic upbringing--takes shape when the sacramental symbols draw their meaning from people's lived experience...

...The great gift of my childhood was that the Catholic sensibility planted in me at the time had a wholeness, beauty, and meaning that would grow in later life...

...Commonweal | 3 April 10, 1998 But I am troubled...

...Parent and pastor, rank-and-file laymen and laywomen, as well as diocesan leaders, all share some responsibility for this decline...

...In part, this comes about because we live in a renowned public school district--one kindergarten teacher has her Ph.D.--where many Catholic parents choose to send their children to the tax-supported bells-and-whistles education offered by our public school...

...In worship, commerce, and recreation, the gospel, while not always lived out, lurked in these encounters, and we sometimes tripped into the grace these moments afforded...

...Faith, learning, and play are situated in a community of believers who also happen to be neighbors...

...In some inner cities, Catholic schools have been closed by fiat of the diocese, abandoning students to decrepit and dangerous public school systems...

...Data published by the National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA) in 1997 confirm that the total number of Catholic elementary schools in the United States declined from 8,281 in 1976 to 6,903 in 1997, with approximately half a million fewer students enrolled in these schools than twenty years earlier...

...This is not to suggest that parish schools are all idyllic, or that the best of them have no shortcomings...

...These trends are demonstrable, real, and national in scope...

...Greater lights than I--Andrew Greeley and James Coleman, for example--have identified and studied part of this phenomenon at work in Catholic schools, using the sociological construct of "social capital...

...Thus a school, church, and community steeped in the Catholic ethos offers the young child--by definition open, impressionable, and i m a g i n a t i v e - - t h e chance to experience Catholic theology married to the every day...

...The parish was the geographic, psychological, and spiritual center of the neighborhood, and its school was full of children from families like ours--large Irish and Italian clans, first-generation suburban, white- and blue-collar breadwinners alike...

...CATHOLIC GRADE SCHOOLS Save them Kathleen McGarvey Hidy ~ hat I remember best of my dayc as a student in Saint Andrew's grade school in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, in the 1970s is that life fit together...

...programs, or through home schooling and p r i v a t e academies...

...I would venture further that the parish school is uniquely equipped to foster not only social capital and the sacramental imagination, but faith formation itself...

...Because the school was rooted in the life of a sacramental community in a particular place, this connectedness provided natural opportunities to reinforce the Catholic faith perspective...

...The experience is multivalent, encompassing, and, as such, far different from the one-dimensional model provided through the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine (CCD) Kathleen McGarvey Hidy is a practicing attorney in Cincimmti, Ohio...

...n sum, the Catholic community in this country appears to be presiding over the gradual dismantling of perhaps its greatest achievement: the creation and maintenance of an academically competitive school system geared to the faith formation of the Catholic young...

...A child's ordinary encounters at school are more likely to be transforming and sacramental when they take shape in and through a faith community...

...In chance encounters at the local supermarket or swim club, Saint Andrew's students could witness their faith affirmed in interaction with fellow students and parishioners...

...Every day, my four siblings and I Ieft our home in suburban Philadelphia to attend our parish school, four blocks away...

...I remember some odd, clearly unhappy nuns, some flawed pedagogic tools (like the wooden pointer broken over my third-grade classmate's head), crowded classrooms, worn textbooks, no gym or cafeteria...

...Still, Saint Andrew's formed me in a Catholic faith and worldview which blesses me today as I make my way through the adult years of marriage, child-rearing, and career-building...

...I believe this Catholic sensibility grew in great measure out of the relationship the parish school had with the parish itself and with the neighborhood...

...Even an excellent CCD program, by definition and design, cannot do what a Catholic Commonweal | 4 April 10, 1998...

...Even in newer suburbs with large school-age populations, some parishes opt against building Catholic schools, signaling to parents that faith formation through CCD is a desirable alternative to a Catholicschool formation...

...This attitude betrays a certain naivet6 about what constitutes adequate faith formation among the young...

...The attitude of these parents is that CCD religious training is sufficient to form and inform their chiIdren's Catholicism, and to inoculate their children against the negativity and nihilism of the culture...

...True, new schools have opened in the past decade, and in the past five years enrollment has shown increases--part of what NCEA president Leonard De Fiore has described as a "true renaissance" for Catholic schools...

...As I look to the future, I see that the gift of a parochial-school faith formation may become a rarity...