By Michelle Martin
Staff writer

Catholic schools cannot look to the idea of charter schools to save them because charter schools cannot provide faith-based education, according to archdiocesan and public school officials.

Charter schools are, by definition, public schools, although they do not have to follow all of the rules governing traditional public schools. But as public schools, they cannot teach religion, have religious requirements for students or staff or be operated by a religious organization, said Greg Richmond, the director of the charter schools office of the Chicago Public Schools.

“I’ve told people that the last thing a healthy Catholic school should be thinking about is becoming a charter school,” said Richmond, himself a Catholic school parent. “It eliminates what the mission of the school is.”

Unlike Catholic schools, charter schools are supported by tax money, not tuition. Chicago charter schools receive the average per-pupil expenditure of the Chicago Public Schools for each student who enrolls—about $5,700 per student for the 2000-2001 school year. That’s more than double the average Catholic elementary school tuition.

While charter school staff do not have to join the Chicago Teachers Union, teacher salaries generally are comparable to traditional Chicago public schools, Richmond said. That can also be almost double Catholic school salaries, especially for experienced teachers.

The idea of turning financially struggling Catholic schools into charter schools has been tossed around in the media recently. First it was announced that the grade school building at St. Gregory Parish, formerly a campus of Northside Catholic Academy, would be leased next school year by an expensive private school based on the British educational system and not a charter school, as some parents had hoped. Then Father John Smyth, executive director of Maryville Academy, said that Our Lady of the Gardens, the Catholic school near the Altgeld Gardens development on the Far Southeast Side, would close in June and be re-opened next year as a charter school.

But the two situations have big differences, Smyth said.

At Our Lady of the Gardens, which this year cost Maryville $850,000 to operate, more than 95 percent of the students are not Catholic. No other Catholic schools operate in the area.

A charter school would be operated by Good Neighbor Charter Schools. Religion could be taught in the building after school hours, and Smyth could serve on the board as an advisor.

At the St. Gregory site, no schools were actually closed. Northside Catholic Academy will continue to operate its other three campuses.

In newspaper reports, officials from the office of Catholic schools were quoted saying that they don’t want charter schools in vacant Catholic school buildings as competitors for nearby Catholic schools.

However, most of the 15 existing charter schools in Chicago are in vacant Catholic school buildings, Richmond said.

In a May 13 letter to editor of the Chicago Tribune about the proposed charter school at Our Lady of the Gardens, Cardinal George explained that the very idea of “converting” Catholic schools into charter schools is misleading.

“Turning over Catholic schools, students and teachers to the public school system is really a way of cannibalizing successful but under-funded schools by incorporating them into the public school system,” the cardinal wrote.

Smyth said that closing a Catholic school and allowing a charter school to move in simply doesn’t make sense in most situations.

“The cardinal was generous enough to make an exception (for Our Lady of the Gardens),” he said. “But, no, I don’t think it would work for most schools.”