Anonymous wrote:No change due to COVID: School is open, planning for September opening just like everyone else. (Though small class sizes make it a little easier to deal with social distancing requirements.). I'm a St Bart's parent, and it really did a fantastic job with distance learning. And just had a sweet end-of-year car parade.

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Anonymous wrote:Is there any talk among the parish about removing the pastor in seeking better management?

Look, I don't know the pastor personally, but he has a good reputation. His brother is a bishop and their dad was a prominent deacon. The diocesan system asks a lot of its pastors. They are in charge of the spiritual formation of their flock as well as administrative functions, including school management. Very few people have this large skill set. I think that the US is the only country in the world with parochial schools. Thank St. Elizabeth Ann Seton for that. In other countries, religious orders or more recently, lay groups, run schools.

Several other countries, including Canada, Spain, Italy, and Germany funnel public funds towards religious schools. Parents don't have to pay taxes for public schools AND pay additional huge funds for Catholic schools on top of that.

If you have a problem with the pastor's management, it's a US-wide problem, not a personal problem.

Amen. I thought the pastor and principal were a bit unfairly attacked in this forum previously.

There should have been a board in place years ago. Regardless, neither the pastor nor the principal communicated AT ALL about the fact that the school was on the brink of being closed. There was no warning. Families knew that numbers were low, but we had faith that the principal and admissions staff were on it.

This is untrue. Have you ever been to a State of the School address? The numbers have been available and it has been a major theme for the past several years that we had to get our numbers up. You are either not an involved parent or have had your head in the sand. Parents have been constantly reminded about the need to recruit friends, family and neighbors in order to keep our school afloat. It doesn’t take a genuine to do the math either. You know what you are paying in tuition...multiply that by the students in your children’s classes and you had no clue about a serious issue with a balance budget?

That's not fair at all. It really depends on how long you've been there. New families came in this year and were given no clue whatsoever. Even coming in last year, if you missed one state of the school address, you didn't know anything. It was never put in writing anywhere and never talked about publicly. If you weren't around the school a lot you didn't know. And also, why spend all that money on the renovation if they expected to close? That was very , very strange.