And so ends another Catholic Schools Week, with the Diocese of Brooklyn celebrating Catholic education within all its schools and academies.
At the beginning of this school year, the diocese’s schools and academies registered more than 900 new students in grades 1-8. Those numbers were expected to rise during the month of September, officials said. Kindergarten enrollment is 2.2% higher than last year.
Figures from the New York City Department of Education show that the public school system lost approximately 50,000 students between 2019 and 2021. And across that system, kindergarten registration is down 17% between 2016 and 2022.
So it’s becoming increasingly clear that some parents are voting with their feet.
“We’re always here, and I think what people are realizing is that they have a choice,” Deacon Kevin McCormack, diocesan superintendent of schools, said in September. “They’re also beginning to realize that ‘free’ isn’t always wonderful.”
To that end, when a family decides to pay for their child’s education, it is a family commitment that shows the importance of learning within a Catholic faith-based foundation.
When you have a community of like-minded people, the atmosphere is contagious with curiosity and a thirst for learning. Deacon McCormack reiterated that sentiment last week during the festivities when he spoke about who we are as Catholics.
“We are a group of people dedicated to the whole understanding of Christ as the center of our lives, but our responsibility is to go out into the world and change it,” he said.
“And that’s what we see with these kids,” he added. “They are beginning to dream, they are beginning to take their Catholic imagination, which says grace abounds everywhere, and it moves to a place where it begins to re-create a future that we can be very excited about.”
And to that end, there is a certain level of evangelization for the children as they progress through their Catholic academic lives that will stay with them for life.
They will always know that the faith that was fostered and developed in Catholic school can be there for them, ready with open arms.
As Deacon McCormack is fond of saying, “Catholic school has a set of values that is not up for grabs. There are certain things that we stand for that are not negotiable.”
And that’s what Catholic educators can guarantee each and every parent when they decide that a faith-based education is right for their child.
Bishop Robert Brennan underscored that mission, saying there is no better way of “transmitting the faith” from one generation to the next than Catholic education. The bishop addied, “It’s putting our best foot forward so that other people can see. It’s a time to introduce our schools to young parents who are just bringing their children to education age and hoping to invite them in.”
Queens mom Maura Hili voted with her feet when she decided to keep her second grade and fourth grade sons in St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Academy rather than transfer them to a public school when the Astoria school provided the boys’ teachers with special microphones that synced with the boys’ hearing aids, helping them cope with their genetic progressive hearing loss.
“This is such a loving, supportive community where the teachers go above and beyond,” a grateful Hili said of the principal and teachers at St. Francis of Assisi Academy after how they accommodated her sons. “I think that’s something that no test metric or anything can ever measure.”