Our Girl of Perpetual Assist Catholic Academy will shut this summer time.
Picture courtesy of Google Maps
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Low enrollment and monetary struggles will convey the top for one more Catholic college in Brooklyn this summer time.
Our Girl of Perpetual Assist Catholic Academy in Sundown Park will completely shut on the finish of the college yr in June, its Board of Trustees introduced final week, greater than a century after it opened.
The Ok-8 academy has been dealing with “unsustainable enrollment and financial trends” for the final 5 years, based on the Diocese of Brooklyn. In 2020, 174 college students attended OLPH. Through the 2024-25 college yr, simply 111 college students attended, and solely 85 have been enrolled for the upcoming yr.
The college has handled declining enrollment for at the least 5 years. Picture courtesy of Jim.henderson/Wikimedia Commons
With enrollment so low, OLPH would have been spending greater than twice the price of tuition on every pupil, per the Diocese — tuition runs $5,500, and the per-student expenditure would have been $11,600.
The Diocese carried out a “thorough analysis” to see if the college could possibly be saved, stated Deacon Kevin McCormack, superintendent of Catholic colleges in Brooklyn and Queens. However the “pattern of student enrollment” and the academy’s monetary scenario made restoration inconceivable.
“Since 1917, Our Lady of Perpetual Help has been educating students in both the faith and academics, and this decision to close will not erase the success of the past 108 years,” McCormack stated.
The Diocese will work with OLPH households to make sure college students might be relocated to close by Catholic colleges, based on the a from the Board.
“St. Ephrem Catholic Academy, our closest partner school, has been especially generous in preparing to welcome our students and keep the spirit of OLPH alive,” the letter states. “We are committed to assisting every family in furthering their child’s education in a Catholic setting.”
The college yr will end as deliberate, the letter says, and college students will nonetheless obtain their First Communion and Affirmation. The Basilica of Our Girl of Perpetual Assist, the church hooked up to the college, will keep open.
About 13 lecturers are at present employed at OLPH, per the college’s web site. John Quaglione, a spokesperson for the Brooklyn Diocese, stated lecturers searching for positions at different Diocesan elementary colleges “will receive support” of their functions, and stated all principals are requested to offer precedence to school and workers of a faculty that’s closing. The closure will probably additionally impression the Regina Opera Firm, which has operated out of OLPH’s auditorium since 2012. Regina didn’t instantly return a request for remark.
OLPH opened as St. Alphonsus College in 1903, and had at the least 1,204 college students by 1910, based on the college’s web site. Our Girl of Perpetual Assist Excessive College, on the identical location because the academy, closed in 1994.
The college would be the fourth Catholic college to shut in Brooklyn within the area of a yr.
In 2024, the Diocese closed the beloved Visitation Academy in Bay Ridge, as there have been solely two nuns remaining on the Visitation Monastery, which sponsored the college. It additionally shuttered Salve Regina Catholic Academy in East New York and St. Catherine of Genoa-St. Therese of Lisieux.
Bishop Robert Brennan of the Brooklyn Diocese with college students at St. Ephram’s final month. Picture courtesy of John Quaglione/DeSales Media
Salve Regina and St. Catherine-St. Therese have been pressured to shut on account of “the pattern of student enrollment and the financial situation of each academy,” McCormack stated final yr in an announcement almost similar to the one issued about OLPH.
New York Metropolis’s Catholic colleges have been struggling for years, although Catholic college enrollment throughout the nation has remained largely regular. Nonetheless, Catholic colleges within the U.S. have misplaced 14.2% of their pupil inhabitants because the 2013-14 college yr, based on a latest report by the Nationwide Catholic Instructional Affiliation, and the variety of Catholic colleges in city areas has been declining for many years.
Dozens of Catholic colleges in New York Metropolis have closed since 2020, together with six in Brooklyn in Queens. Final month, the Archdiocese of New York introduced it could shut two Catholic colleges within the Bronx and that the buildings can be taken over by a constitution college.
Constitution colleges have gotten steadily extra in style within the U.S., based on the Pew Analysis Heart, as enrollment declines in public colleges. Enrollment at New York Metropolis public colleges remained flat this yr, based on Chalkbeat, however consultants anticipate it should drop precipitously within the subsequent decade.
