Winning Formula for Students, But Not for a School's Survival
I've said it before and I'll say it again: It is absolute insanity for our country to allow inner-city Catholic schools to wither away. In many, many cases, they are the only option for parents who want nothing more than a decent education for their children. Here's hoping this is successful in New Jersey:
LOOKING at such realities, Newark's incoming mayor, Cory Booker, has spoken in favor of vouchers that would use public money for private-school tuition, a position guaranteed to inspire fierce opposition. A more politically palatable alternative now sits in the State Legislature. Bills sponsored by two Democrats, Senator Joseph V. Doria Jr. of Jersey City and Assemblywoman Nilsa Cruz-Perez of Camden, would use tax credits, rather than the transfer of public money away from public schools, to provide low-income families with the chance to send their children to a Good Counsel instead of a Barringer.
Using an existing program in Pennsylvania as the model, the bills would establish a dollar-for-dollar tax credit for private companies that donated money for scholarships, or for tuition to out-of-district public schools. The money would be administered by the State Treasury Department, and the program would apply initially only to children living in the Camden, Trenton, Newark and Orange school districts.
| METROPOLITAN DESK |
Winning Formula for Students, But Not for a School's Survival |
NEWARK - ON the day before graduation at Our Lady of Good Counsel High School here, Ruth Ameiorsano walked with her students into the parish church next door for a Mass of Thanksgiving. As the school's sole guidance counselor, Ms. Ameiorsano had particular reason for gratitude. Every one of her 35 seniors had been accepted to college, the third year in a row she had posted a perfect record.
Success had not come easily, not in a place with all the troubles and snares of Newark. Ms. Ameiorsano had compiled transcripts and assembled health records. She had taught SAT prep classes and edited application essays. From those essays, she knew the lives these teenagers led. One girl had seen her cousin shot dead in a drive-by attack. Another recalled an uncle, addicted to heroin, passing out on the family couch.
Now they had their tickets out, stamped for matriculation at Ramapo or Seton Hall or Fairleigh Dickinson. Ms. Ameiorsano, as much as anyone in the cavernous nave on that morning in early June, appreciated the first reading, a passage from Proverbs. ''Hold fast to instruction, never let her go;'' the last verse of the reading admonished, ''keep her, for she is your life.''
Yet this rite of thanksgiving was also, at least in a metaphorical sense, a Mass of Christian Burial. Our Lady of Good Counsel High School was closing after 81 years, the latest victim of the vicious cycle of rising tuition, falling enrollment and mounting deficits that has afflicted urban Roman Catholic schools across the country. Amid all the joy and accomplishment, Ms. Ameiorsano said, ''I felt heartbroken.''
There is indeed good reason to feel heartbreak at the demise of a school like Our Lady of Good Counsel, which achieved so much with a student body that was largely poor and almost entirely nonwhite. There is even better reason to ask what message that closing should send through policy circles, especially in a city whose public schools have proved so resistant to reform as Newark's.
A few weeks after this year's graduating seniors finished first grade in the early summer of 1995, the State Department of Education took over the public school system here, castigating it as being ''at best flagrantly delinquent and at worst deceptive in discharging its obligations.''
posted by Whitney Tilson at 3:16 PM
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