Enrollment Is Rising at Religious Schools : Education: For parents disillusioned by public systems, these institutions offer their children a safe learning environment.

Religion isn’t the only thing attracting more people to the nation’s religious schools these days. Many parents like the wholesome atmosphere.

“Our school is free of drugs, free of violence and free of sex,” said Sulaiman Alfraih, principal of the boys’ school at the Islamic Saudi Academy in Washington.

“Regardless of their ideology, the parents love to see their kids in a very safe, clean environment,” Alfraih said.

The atmosphere of some religious schools was once considered stifling. Now those same schools appeal to parents seeking morality and values for their children--parents who are disillusioned by public systems that by law shun spirituality and are often held hostage to violence.

“A lot of parents told me they’re enrolling in private schools because of all the violence in public schools,” said Joseph E. Zins, an expert on school violence at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio.

“Our schools have a sense of order,” said Sister Catherine McNamee, president of the National Catholic Education Assn. in Washington.

“Parents feel their children are safe, especially in urban areas, and they will develop a sense of moral values,” she said.

The schools are not immune from urban problems, but many parents say religious campuses--from the administration down to the students--tend to support parental efforts to maintain discipline and encourage morality. That was demonstrated earlier this year in Sun Valley, in a rustic corner of Los Angeles, when the Village Christian School invited the Los Angeles Police Department to assign an undercover officer to check rumors of student drug use on its 550-student high school campus.

After a six-month investigation, six students were held on suspicion of selling marijuana. School officials said they were disappointed by the arrests, but parents and students said they were grateful that the school acted so aggressively to discourage drug use.

Village Christian is one of the largest evangelical Christian schools in the nation, with more than 1,900 students in kindergarten through high school.

Educators at Christian, Jewish and Muslim schools say their enrollment is growing, with many students coming from other faiths.

In Washington, the Saudi Arabia-financed Islamic Saudi Academy, which runs separate programs for boys and girls, has seen its enrollment grow from about 800 students in 1990 to about 1,250 today, Alfraih said.

Enrollment at Roman Catholic schools remains far below those in the early 1960s, when the baby boomers pushed attendance up to 5.6 million students, according to the Catholic education group.

But after bottoming out at 2.6 million students in 1988-89, enrollment at the nation’s 8,345 Roman Catholic schools has grown by 1% over the past two years.

Many of the rejuvenated Roman Catholic schools have altered their programs, McNamee said.

Rote learning, in many cases, has been replaced by thought-provoking discussions on religion, and Roman Catholic students have been joined by children from other religions.

“We have more ethnic and religious diversity than we had just 10 years ago,” McNamee said.

Nationwide, about 13% of students at Roman Catholic schools are not Roman Catholic, and about one-fourth are minorities, according to the Catholic group.

Similarly, more than half of the students at Lutheran schools are not Lutheran, said Carl Moser, director of schools for the Lutheran-Church Missouri Synod. Enrollment at the synod’s 2,129 schools has grown 15% from 228,865 to 265,068 since 1988, he said.

At Orthodox Jewish schools, where the study of Torah and Hebrew is mandatory, nearly one-third of the students come from non-observing Jewish homes, said Joshua Fishman, executive vice president of the 560-member National Society for Hebrew Day Schools.