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New funding for local Catholic schools a success, officials say
By Nissa LaPoint
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Photo by James Baca/DCR: |
Catholic school administrators are hailing the new school assistance fund as a success after the first year pilot run.
Parishes of the Denver Archdiocese gave $3.26 million for the 2010-2011 academic year to help keep schools as accessible and affordable to as many families as possible. These funds provided the opportunity for more than 2,200 students to receive a Catholic school education, according to Richard Thompson, superintendent of Catholic schools.
“The generosity of parishes really helps support one-fourth of our (student) population that probably couldn’t be in our schools without that support,” Thompson said.
Among other sources of funding, the Catholic Schools Assistance Fund (CSAF) has been one way parishes support schools by collecting 1.5 percent of a parish’s assessable income. This figure was increased to 3.79 percent and the increase was named CSAF-Plus. This increase in assessment replaced the Interparish School Assistance (ISA) program that required parishes without their own elementary or high schools to pay about $1,000 per archdiocesan school-enrolled student affiliated with a parish. This change was proposed by the Office of Catholic Schools and approved by the presbyterate as a three-year pilot program.
The ISA’s fixed amount per student was a financial burden for poorer parishes who sent their kids to Catholic school. It was difficult or impossible for them to advance the money to that student’s school, Thompson said.
“(CSAF) provided the opportunity for parishes who were further out (of the Denver metro area) who didn’t send kids to Catholic school, and whose students had other school options, to increase their support of Catholic schools,” Thompson said.
By throwing out the ISA program and reorganizing the CSAF fund, the office made a kind of “redistribution of wealth” move, said Ron Sarricchio, assistant business manager at St. Cajetan Parish in Denver.
The change helped ease the burden on financially-strapped parishes and solicited more funds from parishes throughout the archdiocese. The additional funds collected from CSAF-Plus increased the number of contributing parishes from 72 to 140 or more, Thompson said.
It’s too early to determine the long-term success of this change, the superintendent said, which is designed to encourage enrollment from non-school parishes, bring greater investment into schools from all parishes and ease financial stress on poorer parishes.
Thompson also sees this change as a way to remove a school’s role in acting like a collection agency when gathering funds.
“It’s taken away some of the antagonism that may have developed between schools and parishes when schools were trying to collect and parishes didn’t have it,” he said. “One of the theories behind this is that it will increase enrollment,” said Thompson, who added that a parish’s pastor will be more likely to encourage enrollment in a Catholic school.
The archdiocese continues to distribute the CSAF grant monies collected through a need-based formula calculated for every school. Last year, 14 schools received need-based CSAF grants totaling $1.3 million, according to Thompson.
CSAF-Plus is distributed based on the number of out-of-parish affiliated students, rather than the previous per pupil ISA rate of $1,000.
Thirty-seven schools benefitted from the $1.78 million distributed from the CSAF-Plus portion of the assessment. Added to the contribution of Seeds of Hope Charitable Trust, which provides funds for economically-disadvantage students, and The Catholic Foundation, Catholic schools received a total of $5.3 million in assistance last year, according to Thompson.
The change leaves in question whether a parish’s contribution is directly helping students registered at the church, but, Sarricchio said, “We know it’s going to help kids in general.”
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