Bishop Barber: Catholic
Education best way to hand on faith to next generation
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| Elementary School Officials at a school in NYC gather to handout year end material to students (2020 Getty Images) |
Bishop Michael Barber of Oakland, California, speaks about
the dramatic effect the Covid-19 pandemic is having on Catholic Education in
the United States.
By Vatican News
Last week Bishop Michael Barber, S.J., Chairman for Catholic
Education for the US Bishops’ Conference, joined more than 150 interfaith
partners in a petition sent to the US Congress calling for “immediate federal
aid to benefit low-income students in non-public schools”.
In the letter, the coalition stated that “States and
districts will face an unbearable financial burden if current private school
students transfer into public schools in significant numbers”.
They also requested a “one-time emergency tuition
grant for low to middle-income private school families” and Federal Tax Credits
for people who donate to scholarship programs.
Effects of COVID pandemic
In an interview with Christopher Wells, Bishop Barber
spelled out the dramatic effects the pandemic is having on Catholic education
in the country.
He explained that for those parents who are paying tuition
fees in a non-public school, there's no assistance whatsoever given by the
government.
“They’ve got to put food on the table first or pay for their
medicine or whatever. So we estimate right now that over a hundred Catholic
schools have already announced they're not going to reopen in the fall because
they don't have the enrollment”.
As the economic toll of the pandemic continues to hit hard,
many people have found themselves out of work. This in turn has had a knock-on
effect on traditional funding through parishes.
The Bishop noted that a lot of parishes support their
Catholic parochial school and usually provide a subsidy. With parishes unable
to have public Mass, he said, “they're not able to take up collections. And so
where are they going to get the money, first of all to pay their own bills and
keep the lights on in the church, let alone to bail out the school?”
Letter to Congress
Speaking about the recent petition sent to Congress by the
Bishops’ Conference and a coalition of interfaith partners, calling for federal
aid for non-public schools, Bishop Barber explained that the bill going through
the US House of Representatives excludes all children and families that send
their kids to private schools. “This is what formed the Coalition. We said this
is unfair because 10% of children in the US attend a non-public school. And
those are our kids too and those kids and their families deserve help.”
The Bishop also emphasized his belief that parents should
have a choice about where they send their children to school. “They shouldn't
just be forced to send them to the local public school and have no other
alternative because the public school then has no incentive to do a good job or
not”.
He continued by saying that “right now, just Catholic
schools, we save the taxpayers of the USA twenty billion dollars annually. I
don't know what the figure is if you included all private schools in that, but
it will be significantly higher again. We're paying taxes. We're still
supporting public school. And so we're asking then [that] our families get the
help they need to pay tuition to send their kids to schools of their choice,
and so that's why the coalition came together.”
Minorities and Catholic Schools
Bishop Barber pointed out that over 20% of children
attending Catholic Schools are from minority communities and “the parents
deeply love that Catholic school because it's helping their child and the
public school isn't.”
Asked what the Church can do to address the issue of schools
that have already announced closures, the Bishop of Baltimore said, “what we
can do I think is appeal that some of our tax money that goes to education of
children be shared with families and give them school choice options.”
Catholic education, the Bishop underlined, “is the best way
we have to hand on our faith to the next generation.”
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