If you think that you can’t afford a Catholic elementary school education for your child, officials at St. Louise de Marillac School would like you to think again. This year the school, located in LaGrange Park but serving many families in Brookfield, is establishing a formal program where parents can apply for a break on tuition.
“We’re trying to help people out if they feel they can’t afford it,” said Michele Bancroft the principal of St. Louise de Marillac School. “The current initiative is to try to help families who think that they can’t afford the school.”
In the past at St. Louise, school families who have fallen on hard times would meet with the principal and the pastor to see if they could get a reduction in tuition. Under the new program parents, including those who currently do not have any children at the school, will confidentially disclose their financial information to a third party reviewer via an online form.
That company, Private School Aid Service, will determine how much the tuition the family can afford to pay and forward that information on the school, which will make the final decision on what kind of tuition break, if any, to offer. The program is much like the process of applying for financial aid to colleges and universities.
“The program decides what can be afforded for tuition and then gives that to us. And then we’ll look at it and see what we’re able to give the family, if we can do the whole thing or if not,” Bancroft said.
The more formalized process is designed to help parents who may have hesitated to ask before, because they did not want to reveal personal financial information to their pastor and the principal.
“As the years have rolled on you want to have something a little bit more transparent, a little bit more available to everybody and not just because a family has the gumption, so to speak, to go and talk to the pastor about a particular financial issue,” said Dan Graham, the vice president of the school advisory committee at St. Louise de Marillac School.
“We want to take that stigma about and make the program available to all families who need some assistance,” he said. “There’s no one-size-fits-all response to someone’s application for tuition assistance.”
The program is called Providing Access to Catholic Education or PACE.
Tuition at St. Louise de Marillac Catholic School is $4,115 for parishioners who send one child to school. For two children at the school, parishioners pay $6,444. Non-parishioners pay about $1,400 more.
One goal of the PACE program is to boost enrollment, which has been falling in recent years. With school set to start next week only about 140 students have enrolled at St. Louise for the coming year. That’s a drop from an enrollment of an enrollment of about 170 students last year and includes students in preschool through eighth grade.
As of last week only six second graders and eight first graders have registered at St. Louise for the coming year.
“It’s probably gone down more in the last couple of years because of the economy,” Bancroft said. “We’ve lost about 30 kids in the last couple of years.”
The tiny classes, while allowing for extremely personalized instruction, make it difficult to run the school efficiently. The hope is that the PACE program will spur increased enrollment at the school and allow the costs of running the school to be spread out among more families
“I’d like to see enrollment increase by 30 to 50 students,” Bancroft said. “It would be very nice. That would be very good for us.”
Graham agrees.
“The higher the enrollment, the lower the cost of everyone,” Graham said.
Currently tuition and fundraising covers 70 to 80 percent of the cost for running the school, with the parish subsidizing the rest. The parish would like to decrease the subsidy.
“They’re probably decreasing that because they don’t have that much to give us,” Bancroft said.
Enrollment has been dropping at many other near western suburban Catholic schools for decades. A number of Catholic elementary schools have shut down including Mater Christi School in North Riverside in 2005 and St. Hugh in Lyons in 2001.
Bancroft is hoping that the PACE program boosts enrollment and keeps St. Louise’s school strong, but she knows that in today’s economy it is difficult for many families to come up with the tuition money when they have the alternative of a nearly free public school education.
“I’m certainly hopeful, but it’s hard to tell if people are going to make a switch and come to the Catholic school instead of the public school, but I’m certainly hopeful that they are going to think about it,” Bancroft said.