The Tampa Bay Times recently profiled Chris Pastura, a new school superintendent of a Catholic diocese in a state that, as we've noted before, is bucking national trends.
Bolstered by a quartet of scholarship programs, Catholic school enrollment in the Diocese of St. Petersburg, like Florida as a whole, is growing again.
The diocesan school leader says he wants to keep that going.
Pastura is dealing with aging school infrastructure and has dreams of partnering with Catholic universities to help prolong students' Catholic education through college. He wants to maintain educational quality by focusing on the standards of what kids really need to know rather than simply following trends, and by retaining staffers who spread the Gospel through word and deed.
"People will come if you're doing some really good things," he said. "If that's marketing, then so be it."
But while enrollment is fairly healthy, demand for financial aid is on the rise.
Scholarship programs — including tax credit scholarships, which Step Up For Students, the host of this blog, helps administer — are helping Catholic schools serve more students who couldn't otherwise afford tuition, and allowing them to start growing again.
In Florida the recovery, while steady, has been slow: A fraction of a percentage point per year since 2011. Yet it has more Catholic school students on scholarships than any other state, suggesting a path to stability and growth that could be copied elsewhere.
According to the latest federal statistics, there are fewer Catholic schools now than there were in 1920, and there are fewer students enrolled than there were during the Greet Depression. There are many reasons why Catholic schools have shrunk steadily since 1960, but the experience in Florida suggests the decline is not entirely due to a lack of demand. There are large numbers of parents who believe their children could benefit from a Catholic education, but lack the means to pay for one on their own.
As scholarship parent Linda McDonald told the Times: "They're a place for a lot of families like me who have encountered a lot of difficulties in their lives where they accept you with open arms."
