Hotel Vegas
Anecdotal Support of a Private School
RECEIVED Mon., May 23, 2005
Dear Editor,
I went to a Catholic elementary in the early Sixties. It had 16 classes, grades one through eight, with about 32 students each ["Shrinking Schools," News, May 20]. The administration consisted of one part-time secretary. One of the eighth-grade teachers served as principal when the need arose, and other teachers helped her with paperwork after the final bell.
Our playground was the parking lot. We all carried a lunch to school, and nobody was allowed to fail. With the exception of one boy in my class with emotional troubles, I think everyone received a superior education. Some non-Catholic families begged to have their children admitted.
I looked up St. Margaret's on the Web. The neighborhood has changed from white to black, and from lower middle class to lower class. The school reflects this. Forty percent of students' families live at or below the poverty line, and nearly all are black. Tuition is $3,100 per year for one child, $4,600 for two, or $5,500 for three or more. Alumni donors help the poorest students. (Public schools in nearby Washington, D.C., spend $11,000 per year per pupil for substandard educations.)
Hot lunches are now provided. The student body has shrunk, but standards have not. Students must plan on 30 minutes of homework beginning in first grade and up to two hours in grades five through eight each weeknight. Parents must sign a log book every day certifying that assignments have been completed. If a student does not complete his assignments, the school refunds the tuition and expels him.
The attitude is if we can't provide a good education then the child deserves to go to a better school. But there are few schools that could claim that distinction. See www.stmoscs.org.
I went to a Catholic elementary in the early Sixties. It had 16 classes, grades one through eight, with about 32 students each ["Shrinking Schools," News, May 20]. The administration consisted of one part-time secretary. One of the eighth-grade teachers served as principal when the need arose, and other teachers helped her with paperwork after the final bell.
Our playground was the parking lot. We all carried a lunch to school, and nobody was allowed to fail. With the exception of one boy in my class with emotional troubles, I think everyone received a superior education. Some non-Catholic families begged to have their children admitted.
I looked up St. Margaret's on the Web. The neighborhood has changed from white to black, and from lower middle class to lower class. The school reflects this. Forty percent of students' families live at or below the poverty line, and nearly all are black. Tuition is $3,100 per year for one child, $4,600 for two, or $5,500 for three or more. Alumni donors help the poorest students. (Public schools in nearby Washington, D.C., spend $11,000 per year per pupil for substandard educations.)
Hot lunches are now provided. The student body has shrunk, but standards have not. Students must plan on 30 minutes of homework beginning in first grade and up to two hours in grades five through eight each weeknight. Parents must sign a log book every day certifying that assignments have been completed. If a student does not complete his assignments, the school refunds the tuition and expels him.
The attitude is if we can't provide a good education then the child deserves to go to a better school. But there are few schools that could claim that distinction. See www.stmoscs.org.
Vincent J. May
Elgin
Elgin
[News Editor Michael King responds:
As long as we're comparing childhoods, I also attended a Catholic grammar school where I received the considerable benefit of faith-based slave labor, but I don't suppose Vincent May is volunteering to dedicate his life to teaching in return for food and shelter. Perhaps he is proposing that the Poor Handmaidens of Jesus Christ, or some similar religious order, assume the task of educating 4 million Texas students, but the numbers are a little daunting. Then again, the nuns could simply expel any student deemed insufficiently attentive; that would certainly both ease overcrowding and pump up the standardized test scores. Whatever the apparent value of the "superior education" Mr. May allegedly received at St. Margaret's, it obviously did not prepare him for any response to questions of public education policy other than the nostalgic or the reflexively ideological. Perhaps he should ask the good sisters for a refund.]
