A CATHOLIC EDUCATION

The demise of Our Lady of Corvallis High School in Studio City demonstrates a nationwide quandary: Fewer Catholic girls become nuns these days, so a dwindling number of teachers is available to teach the fewer girls contented to attend an all-girls’ school. In addition, the school has experienced problems particular to its location and administration. But its closing in June will provide students to other Catholic high schools struggling to stay afloat.

On the evening of Jan. 8, about 160 students of Our Lady of Corvallis High School in Studio City and principals from 10 other Catholic high schools will hold an unusual bazaar: They’ll be shopping for each other.

Freshmen, sophomores and juniors at the San Fernando Valley’s oldest Catholic high school will need other schools next September because Corvallis, after years of struggling to stay afloat financially, will close in June.

And most of the other Valley Catholic high schools can use more students.

On Jan. 6 and 7, all but the seniors--Corvallis’ 45th and last graduating class--will take home applications for other schools. On the evening of Jan. 8, the principals of the other schools will set up shop at tables in the Corvallis gym, available to talk to parents and students and accept applications.

The parceling out of the girls of Corvallis is the beginning of the last chapter in the history of a school that was founded in 1941 as Corvallis High School, a name formed by combining the Latin words cor for heart and vallis for valley.

One reason for Corvallis’ collapse is that its location on Laurel Canyon Boulevard may have been in the heart of the Valley in 1941, but is not today. Population growth to the north and west--particularly the Catholic population likely to have teen-age daughters--left Corvallis behind.

The other factors that killed Corvallis, according to administrators from Corvallis and other Catholic high schools:

A decision in 1981 by the order of nuns that founded the school to pull out, leaving the school in the hands of a group of die-hard parents and supporters.

Increased competition for a shrinking supply of Catholic students.

Increasing reluctance by girls to attend an all-girls school.

The decision of nearby Notre Dame High School, once a boys’ school, to go co-educational in 1982.

And five years of rumors that Corvallis was in financial trouble.

“There’s been a cloud hanging over our heads for years, and parents didn’t want their girls to come to a school they feared would close,” said Christine Thranow, the school’s principal since 1975.

“It became a self-fulfilling prophecy,” commented an administrator at another Valley Catholic high school, who asked not to be identified. “All that talk about their financial problems kept prospective students away, and that just made their problems worse and fed more rumors.”

There are fears of a similar problem at another school. Catholic school administrators throughout the Valley area agreed that, although most Catholic high schools--except Notre Dame--would like slightly higher enrollments, only one is facing the kind of financial pressures that drove Corvallis under: Providence High School in Burbank.

Providence, a girls’ school that went co-ed in 1975 (“and it didn’t help them any,” the principal of another school said), claims an enrollment of 300 students out of a capacity of 400 to 500, although some administrators of other schools say it may actually be as low as 260.

However, the Sisters of Providence, who operate the school, are completing a $750,000 overhaul of the campus buildings, “which we wouldn’t be doing if we didn’t intend to remain here and remain in operation,” said the new principal, Sister Lucille Dean. Her order has made a decision to spend whatever is needed to keep the school open until a predicted increase in the number of high school students in the early 1990s, she said.

The Sisters of Providence watched what happened in the “self-fulfilling prophecy” at Corvallis and are trying to prevent the same process from driving Providence enrollment even lower, she conceded. “Providence Alive,” proclaimed the front-page headline in the latest issue of the school newspaper.

Declining enrollments have become a problem for Catholic high schools throughout the country, said Rhoda Goldstein, a data collector for the National Catholic Educational Assn. in Washington. In 1966 there were 2,413 Catholic high schools in the nation, with an enrollment of 1.08 million. Today, there are 1,434, with an enrollment of 760,000.

Fewer Nuns

Catholic schools have been hurt by a decline in the number of girls who become nuns, who formerly supplied the cheap labor that enabled Catholic schools to offer good private education for a minimal tuition.

Twenty years ago, Goldstein said, 80% of Catholic school teachers were nuns, priests or brothers, and 20% were lay persons. “Today that ratio is reversed,” she said, and the need to charge higher tuitions to pay lay teachers’ salaries has driven away some students.

Additionally, said administrators at many Catholic high schools, Studio City, Sherman Oaks, Van Nuys and other eastern Valley neighborhoods that traditionally have fed into private schools now have an aging population.

Those who moved to the area with children 15 or 20 years ago have remained in their homes, many of which are now too expensive for younger couples, who move instead to the West Valley or the Santa Clarita or Conejo valleys. That has brought comfortably full enrollments to Catholic schools in those areas.

But at Corvallis, the school’s parking lot tells part of the story. The problem with parking at Corvallis is that there is no problem. Unlike virtually any other private day school in Southern California, there is plenty of parking space at Corvallis.

Enrollment Peak in 1980

Designed for more than 350 students--enrollment hit a peak of 425 in 1980--the school has dwindled to 247. Only 30 freshmen enrolled this year. When the 67 seniors graduate in June, there would only be 160 to 180 students, administrators estimate.

Many of the girls who might have been at Corvallis are instead at Notre Dame. “When Notre Dame went co-ed, we lost 30 girls right off the bat, sophomores who simply transferred away,” said John Wiley, president of the Corvallis board of directors.

Ironically, Corvallis could have gone with them.

The two schools, only two miles apart, had long been matched in the kind of social pairing that is common to Catholic single-sex schools. Such match-ups, usually begun socially by the students, can continue as a tradition for generations: the students date mainly each other, the girls’ school provides football cheerleaders and the boys’ school fills male roles in the girls’ school plays.

In 1980, the Holy Cross priests who founded Notre Dame in 1947 suggested to the sisters of The Sacred Heart of Mary, who ran Corvallis, that they study a merger.

Merger Terms

After a year’s study, the priests offered a merger on just about any terms the nuns wished, participants say. These included their taking in all the Corvallis students, with no obligation on the nuns to provide teachers for the combined school.

But the nuns rejected the offer and left Notre Dame to go co-ed on its own, said Brother Stephen Walsh, principal of Notre Dame.

“The fathers were very disappointed and sent a letter to parents telling them that the decision not to merge the schools was made entirely by the sisters,” Principal Thranow said. Since then, out of its 990 students, the number of girls at Notre Dame has grown to 440--many of them girls who otherwise would have gone to Corvallis, administrators at both schools agree.

The nuns who founded Corvallis did not want to save the school, but rather to close it. They were motivated by changes that have affected Catholic education throughout the country, particularly the changes in the role of women, as in American society as a whole.

The order could not see a need for Corvallis and was faced with a decreasing number of nuns, many of whom did not want to be teachers, said Sister Kathleen Keleman, secretary to the provincial superior in Westchester.

“Our schools were built by our sisters working in them for a minimal amount of money,” she said, noting the decline in the number of nuns.

Membership Dropping

“In 1960 we had about 2,000 members, and in 1986 we’re about 1,400. Here in California, there are only 114 of us. But instead of being teachers, some of them are doing parish work; some, college campus ministries; some have gone to work with the poor in North Carolina, and one is working in a prison.”

Corvallis’ enrollment was full in 1980, but the order worried that it was prospering from “white flight,” that many of the students were non-Catholic girls looking for a comparatively inexpensive private school to escape forced busing to achieve integration in the Los Angeles public schools, she said. Busing ended in 1981.

Demographics projected a drop in the number of Catholic high school students in the Valley throughout the 1980s, she said, “and it was evident to us there were enough Catholic schools in the Valley to take care of the students.”

In the same period, the order pulled back in several places--closing or turning over to others an elementary school and two high schools in Santa Barbara and San Jose.

In the Los Angeles area, it retained its link with Loyola-Marymount University and continued to operate two girls’ high schools, Marymount, a prestigious school in Bel-Air, and Sacred Heart of Mary in Montebello.

‘No Need for Corvallis’

“It was clear to us there was no need for Corvallis” in a middle-class area served by many other Catholic schools, she said, “but there is a real need for Sacred Heart of Mary, which serves a predominantly Hispanic and Catholic population from East Los Angeles.”

The order charges only $1,180 for a year’s tuition there--less than half the $2,600 that is the standard tuition at non-diocesan Catholic high schools--”and we subsidize it heavily” from money the order takes in at Marymount and elsewhere, she said.

But the order’s attempt to close Corvallis in 1981 met with resistance from parents and students who did not want to shift schools or merge with a boys’ school, she said.

The order reluctantly agreed to lease--but not sell--the Corvallis High School buildings to the parents, who carried on as a legally new school, renamed Our Lady of Corvallis High School.

“We were happy the nuns allowed us to use a name that close to the old one,” board President Wiley said. “We were afraid they would insist on something completely different.”

Lease on Property

But what the nuns would not do was to let go of the property. They gave the new school only a four-year lease, which was eventually extended to 11 years, expiring in 1992. The school now pays the order $100,000 a year for the buildings, one of its chief expenses.

The nuns also severed all connections. Although some nuns still live in the residence on the old school grounds, “they put up a fence between us,” said Thranow, herself an ex-nun.

“They insisted on the name change, and they broke all ties. Sometimes I will run into one when they drop off our mail, which gets delivered over there by mistake, and we chat, but we never discuss the school,” Thranow said.

The order has not decided what it will do with the land, which was appraised at $4 million in 1980, Keleman said. There is no truth to rumors among Corvallis parents that the order has longstanding plans to turn the school into a retirement center for its nuns or to sell it for condominium development in return for the cash to build a retirement center elsewhere.

However, she said, the average age of the order’s nuns is increasing, and the need for such a center is still “a very large concern.”

The school’s lack of its own land was a financial obstacle Our Lady of Corvallis could not overcome, Wiley said.

Dipping Into Reserve

A fund for new land could not grow because the administration had to keep dipping into its reserve fund to pay teachers’ salaries, as the income from tuition sank with the enrollment, he said.

“We were running on money left over from the good old days five years ago,” he said, but “the reserve is down to less than $100,000 now, which may be $30,000 or $40,000 short of the amount we need to get to June.” Corvallis may have to throw a fund-raising event just to cover expenses until it can close, he said.

In retrospect, Thranow reflected: “We were living in a fantasy world, trusting that the nuns would give us the land, or sell it to us at a price we could pay, that somehow they just wouldn’t let the school die. But we were wrong. They really meant what they said, but we refused to listen.”

On Nov. 1, 14 members of the board of directors held an emergency meeting at Wiley’s Northridge home to face up to the prospect of closing the school.

When the moment finally came, after four hours of debate, the board turned to its “outsider” members--a financial adviser and two administrators from non-Catholic Valley private schools--to bring a cold eye to bear on the finances and make the call on whether further efforts to save the school would be fruitless.

“We didn’t include any parents or anyone else with an emotional attachment to the school so that personal feelings wouldn’t influence the decision,” said Wiley, whose wife and daughter were graduated from Corvallis.

‘No Way Out’

Their answer, he said, was that “there was just no way out financially.”

At a meeting in the school gym earlier this month, the board faced an emotional crowd of about 100 students and 250 adults.

Parents berated Wiley and the other board members, demanding that something be done to keep the school going.

“We told you,” Wiley replied in exasperation. “We told you. We’re in the hole. The money isn’t there. We told you this was coming.”

“Give us a chance,” implored a girl who identified herself as a freshman.

“We know you tried, but you didn’t try hard enough” complained another girl.

Some girls hugged each other and cried.

One father suggested that the Pope be invited to speak at the school on his visit to Los Angeles next year and ask for support.

Historic Monument Status

Another father proposed that, as the first Catholic high school in the Valley, Corvallis be declared a historical monument, somehow forcing the Archdiocese of Los Angeles to support the school.

The archdiocese, which operates its own high school system, has no financial connection to Corvallis, and Archbishop Roger Mahony had turned down an appeal for help, Wiley pointed out.

Some girls expressed worry that they would not be accepted at the schools they want to attend--which may be true, for some.

At popular Notre Dame, the administration said preference would be given to girls with brothers or sisters enrolled at Notre Dame, to Catholic girls and to those who will be seniors next year. That should more than account for the 30 or so girls that the school feels able to accept, Brother Walsh said.

Other administrators expressed worry that some Corvallis girls were not up to their academic standards. “Most of the students are just fine, but there are a few, from what I hear, that were admitted during the last few years when they were just desperate, who never would have been admitted five or 10 years ago,” one administrator said.

“While we have some concerns about their admissions policies recently, we still trust their grading,” another principal said, “and we feel we can make our selection on that basis.”

At Providence, however, “the Corvallis girls would certainly be welcome,” said the principal, Sister Lucille. “We could take 100 of them.”