When school ends May 25 at St. John’s Catholic School in Shady Valley, it will be the last time students attend classes there.
Because of dwindling enrollment, St. John’s parish will close the school and merge it with Holy Child School in Arnold, said the Rev. Robert Manning, who has been the parish pastor for the last three years.
Eighty-one students are enrolled in St. John’s, he said.
“That’s our problem,” Manning said. “We had over 200 (students) at one point. Over the last nine years, enrollment has been going down, but it’s really been going down the last three years. They say you need 200 to make a school, and I think I could make it work with 150, but not 81.”
Manning said he and other school officials have been planning since last school year to close the school.
“A year ago I called the education office at the Archdiocese and said I need to close the school because I can’t afford the payroll, but it was too late (to close it) for this school year,” he said. “Then, this year it got worse. We had fewer kids. So, we had a committee formed with seven on the committee and we looked at everything. We met for about three months at the end of last year. We also involved the parish council and finance committee, and the majority proposed to merge with Holy Child. We had to make a decision by the end of December to ask the Archdiocese permission to close, and about a month ago we got permission to close.”
Manning said of the 640 families that belong to the St. John’s Church, which is on Old Hwy. 21 in the Shady Valley area, 54 have children enrolled in the school.
“We’ll lose attendance as parishioners (when the school closes),” he said. “It won’t have a huge impact, but we don’t want to lose anybody.”
About 12 of St. John’s 81 students plan to attend Holy Child next school year, he said.
Holy Child principal Joann Coyle said the Arnold school, which has an enrollment of 230 students, has plenty of room for St. John’s students and won’t have to make any special accommodations.
“We’re hoping to have some of their teachers because we have natural retirement going on,” Coyle said,
About 25 students from St. John’s plan to attend another Catholic school, Our Lady Queen of Peace in House Springs, which is closer to many of the parishioners’ homes, Manning said.
“The Parish covers the area all along Hwy. 21 from almost to Arnold to High Ridge,” he said. “The heaviest concentration of parishioners is in the Romaine Creek area, but we have quite a few in High Ridge, and that’s a lot closer to House Springs.”
Coyle said she would like to see more of the students attend Holy Child, but she is happy that many plan to stay in Catholic schools.
“What we really want is for them to continue with their Catholic education,” she said. “That is our wish for them.”
Manning said many St. John’s students may end up in public schools, though.
He said Catholic schools across the country are seeing a decline in enrollment.
“I talked to the archbishop about it (declining enrollment), and he agreed it’s a problem,” Manning said. “There seems to be apathy among people about sending their children to Catholic school. And, out here (in Jefferson County) public schools are really good, so people come here and buy a new home, and they’re stretched pretty thin financially. They have car payments and dance lessons and everything else, so they don’t have the money to send them to Catholic school.”
Coyle said Holy Child, which has students in kindergarten through fifth grade at its Immaculate Conception Church campus and students in grades six through eight at its St. David Church campus, also has experienced some decline in enrolment over the last several years.
“All the Catholic schools are suffering, so we’re having normal decline, but nothing dramatic,” she said.
Manning said he is sorry to see the school close. “I’m very sad to see it go. I didn’t want to do it,” he said. “It breaks my heart.”
Manning said the parish still plans to start building a new church in the next few years. It already has property about one-fourth mile south of the current church. “We couldn’t build a new facility yet because we didn’t have the money,” he said. “Now there’s a good chance in a year or so we can do it. We don’t know if we could have built a church and school at the same time.”
Manning said it probably would be several years before the new church is complete. “We have to have a feasibility study and a capital campaign, and we need to get permission from the Archdiocese. We need to draw plans to get permits and then start construction,” he said. “We’re five or six years away from finishing it.”
Manning said after a new church is built, perhaps the parish could at some time build another school.
“One of the problems (contributing to low enrollment) is the building is so bad,” he said. “I anticipate that if we build a new church, that in several years, they (parishioners) will come to the pastor and say, ‘We need a school,’ and then we’ll have the support for it.”
St. John’s preschool program still will be open next year. Classes are held in a building next to the school, at 4525 Old Hwy. 21. Enrollment currently is open for half- and full-day programs for children ages 3 to 5.
A preschool preview for new or prospective parents and their children will be held from 7-8 p.m. Thursday, March 29.
Holy Child also has a preschool program that has an enrollment of about 50.
