ST. LOUIS — St. Roch grade school in the Skinker-DeBaliviere neighborhood is one of the most racially and religiously diverse in the Archdiocese of ºüÀêÊÓƵ. Some parents think that might have been its undoing.
The archdiocese announced Friday that St. Roch will close at the end of the school year along with Little Flower in Richmond Heights. Both schools have experienced steep enrollment declines, but parishioners tried to come up with growth plans to keep them open.
Starting in the 1980s under the late Msgr. Sal Polizzi, St. Roch became a destination for non-Catholic families looking for an alternative to public schools. About half the 130 students are Black and come from all corners of the city.
“We felt like we were all pulling together and everybody had a similar set of values,†said Paul Granneman, whose daughter attends St. Roch. “It’s extremely disappointing to see the actions the archdiocese has taken and try to align that with the values that they espouse. They’ll preach about evangelization all they want, then turn around and use it against a school like St. Roch with a high percentage of non-Catholics.â€
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David Doell is not Catholic and said he chose St. Roch for his seventh-grade son because of its reputation for strong academics.
“It’s a racially diverse social experiment that evolved over the years,†Doell said. “It’s a cool little unique thing we had going on there that I don’t think is going to be replaced.â€
Families at both schools knew closure was a possibility in the archdiocese’s “All Things New†downsizing plan but thought they had more time. Pastors of the 25 to 30 smallest grade schools, including St. Roch and Little Flower, submitted three-year viability plans last month with goals for increasing enrollment and fundraising.
Pastors were not asked to consider the number of non-Catholic students in the plans, said Brecht Mulvihill, spokesman for the archdiocese.
“St. Roch is not unique in educating a large percentage of non-Catholic students,†Mulvihill said. “There are several schools in the Archdiocese of ºüÀêÊÓƵ that have a higher proportion of non-Catholic students, including two archdiocesan elementary schools.â€
For the past year, the St. Roch community rallied to save their school with new social events and marketing tools. They parked a St. Roch truck at the top of Art Hill on a February snow day to advertise the school to families there for sledding. St. Roch alumni in local high schools posted testimonial videos to the website. Less than two weeks before the closure announcement, the school hosted an open house and student showcase called St. Roch Shines.
Ultimately, fewer than 100 students enrolled for next year, which made the school financially unsustainable.
At Little Flower, school families and parishioners clashed over the viability plan. Parents increasingly felt the school had become too small to provide resources such as art and music classes. Some wanted the school to convert to an early learning center for preschool through second grade. Older parishioners pushed for a blended learning model, which includes some online instruction to save costs.
The parishioners won that argument and submitted a plan to build enrollment in kindergarten through eighth grades. But it came too late — only eight students and a handful of staff committed to return to Little Flower next year. The preschool is expected to remain open.
“Little Flower School is a vital part of this community and it will be detrimental to the neighborhood and all the children that will never know the faith, education and values that Little Flower has so beautifully instilled in so many students/families for almost one hundred years,†one parishioner wrote in a timeline of the efforts to save the school.
Original blueprints for “All Things New†called for nearly half of the 82 parish grade schools to close or merge due to falling enrollment and rising deficits. There are about 19,000 students — down from 40,000 in 2000 — in kindergarten through eighth grade across the archdiocese, which covers ºüÀêÊÓƵ and 10 counties in eastern Missouri.
The decisions on school closures were postponed until after Archbishop Mitchell Rozanski’s decision last May to close 34 parishes and merge 15 others. The first three schools to close were Good Shepherd in Hillsboro, St. Mark in south ºüÀêÊÓƵ County and St. Rose in Florissant.
The downsizing of parochial schools is still in the “early stages,†and implementation will take several years, said Mulvihill of the archdiocese.
As part of the restructuring, ºüÀêÊÓƵ Catholic Academy will move into the former La Salle Charter School campus on north Jefferson Avenue by next fall, the archdiocese said Wednesday.
ºüÀêÊÓƵ Catholic Academy got its start as St. Engelbert school more than 130 years ago. After multiple mergers over the decades, it became the only Catholic grade school remaining in north ºüÀêÊÓƵ and is now on the campus of St. Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist in the Penrose neighborhood. The school of mostly Black students is operated by the archdiocese.
The La Salle school is on the site of the former St. Bridget of Erin parish in the Carr Square neighborhood. La Salle was the first Catholic school to convert to a publicly funded charter school in 2015. It closed last year for academic failures.
ºüÀêÊÓƵ Catholic Academy enrolls 160 students and will have room for 300 in the new building.