Tuition Grants Are Boon to Parish Schools

As Catholic schools opened this week, steadily growing tuition grants for children of low-income families in the Los Angeles archdiocese are making a significant difference for schools in poor parishes in the San Fernando Valley.

“Our school sits in the middle of a housing project in Pacoima,” said Patricia Vasquez, principal of Guardian Angel School, which has about 275 students in kindergarten through eighth grade. “The grants are instrumental in keeping our enrollment at a level where we can stay open.”

At St. Elisabeth School in Van Nuys, the tuition aid “allowed 27 families that probably couldn’t have sent their children here to do so,” said Sister Barbara Schamber, the principal, whose school’s enrollment rose slightly this year to 340 students.

The archdiocese’s Education Foundation announced that 3,900 economically disadvantaged students will receive $3.75 million in grants for the 1998-99 school year to offset tuition costs. The grant total is $450,000 higher than last year’s amount and more than $1 million more than grants made two years ago.

The foundation, formed in 1987 with money from major donors and nonprofit organizations, now has an endowment of nearly $82 million. Its annual gift campaign raised $3 million last year.

“We want to keep Catholic schools--especially in the inner city--accessible and affordable,” Cardinal Roger M. Mahony said in a statement.

Overall enrollment at Catholic schools in the archdiocese, which encompasses Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, is slightly more than 100,000 students, about the same as last year, said Jerome Porath, superintendent of schools for the archdiocese.

Of that total, 84,000 students attend 248 schools supervised by the archdiocesan school system. The rest are in privately run Catholic schools, which are not eligible for the tuition-grant program.

When installed as archbishop of Los Angeles 12 years ago today, Mahony inherited an often haphazard system of subsidies for schools in low-income parishes. “There was no organized pattern to help the most needy kids,” said Phil Jordan, executive director of the Education Foundation, which Mahony founded to develop an endowment for tuition assistance. “There were also no records of what was done.”

Enlisting the help of business leaders, Mahony prevailed upon attorney Richard Riordan--now Los Angeles’ mayor--to serve as the foundation’s president for the first five years. Riordan was succeeded by William T. Huston, board chairman and CEO of Watson Land Co., which handles commercial and industrial properties.

Its first grants--for the 1988-89 school year--totaled about $500,000 awarded to 740 students.

With an ultimate goal of a $100 million endowment, the foundation is the nation’s largest Catholic school tuition-assistance program to low-income families, Jordan said.

Families eligible for grants must have incomes at or below poverty guidelines set by the Federal School Lunch Program, Jordan said. For example, he said, “a family of four cannot exceed an annual income of $23,000.”

Because Catholic school tuitions rise periodically--the yearly average is just above $2,000 per student at elementary schools and slightly more than $3,000 at high schools--the grant amounts have had to keep pace. “We try to keep the grants at 40% to 50% of the tuition,” Jordan said.

Individual grants have increased, from $650 to $800 for elementary school students this year and from $1,000 to $1,500 for high school students last year. In some past years when the grant amounts were not increased, the foundation increased the available number of grants.

For instance, 27 families at Pacoima’s Guardian Angel and Van Nuys’ St. Elisabeth received grants this year. “But when I first came here seven years ago, only 20 families could receive grants,” said Schamber of St. Elisabeth School.

More qualified families apply each year than there are grants available. “We had about 55 parents apply last March,” Schamber said. “Many of our parents, even if employed, are in low-pay positions.”

Local school administrators are allowed to recommend that priority be given to applicants who are active in their Catholic parishes or have had children enrolled in the school before. That is the policy at Guardian Angel and St. Elisabeth, the principals said.

But the foundation does not require applicants to state their religious affiliation, Jordan said. At some Catholic schools in heavily African American parts of South Central Los Angeles, it is expected that a fair number of non-Catholic families are receiving grants, he said. The non-Catholic enrollment at Verbum Dei High School, at 111th Street and Central Avenue, is 51%, mostly African Americans with a predominantly Protestant background.

Non-Catholic enrollment in Catholic schools, which is 16% in Western states, is about 12% in the Los Angeles elementary schools and a bit higher in high schools, according to Porath, the archdiocesan superintendent of schools.

The highest ratio of non-Catholic students tends to be in the more expensive, privately run Catholic schools, Porath said. “They often get families who are willing and able to pay for a better education,” he said.