DENNIS ODA / DODA@STARBULLETIN.COM
Jill Sprott and her daughter, 5-year-old Zoe, took a break yesterday from sorting through books once used by Jill to teach at Our Lady of Sorrows School. The Wahiawa school's abrupt closure last week left teachers like Jill and students like Zoe scrambling to find places at other schools this fall.
A parish's decision to close
a Wahiawa school leaves
families and staff scrambling
Our Lady of Sorrows School in Wahiawa meant more than a job to Jill Sprott.
She attended the small Catholic parish school as a child, joined its faculty five years ago, and her daughter graduated from kindergarten there last week.
So the parish's abrupt decision to close her alma mater came as a triple blow.
"It hit me on all levels -- as a student, as a teacher and as a parent," she said yesterday. "I think it's frightening. It leaves us in the lurch."
The closure has left 67 students scrambling to find places at other schools this fall, and 13 faculty and staff members looking for new jobs. Students left for summer vacation Thursday afternoon, not knowing they would never come back. The staff learned the bad news on Friday, the same day parents received a letter from Rev. Clarence Fisher, pastor of Our Lady of Sorrows.
Enrollment at the school, which has students from kindergarten through eighth grade, had dropped by nearly half since the fall of 2001, from 130 students to just 67 registered for the coming school year.
Fisher said the school would have faced a deficit of $80,000 if it had tried to open with so few students. It already has exhausted $36,000 in savings and is using another $36,000 in parish funds, he said.
"I am sure that this advisory comes as a shock to some, but we cannot continue to spiral downward as the deficit mounts, becoming an increasing burden to the parish and the diocese," Fisher wrote.
At a meeting Monday night with parish and school officials, parents and staff vented their dismay at the sudden shutdown. Most private schools have already admitted students for the coming school year and settled on their teaching staff.
"Closing a school is very painful," Patrick Downes, spokesman for the Catholic Diocese of Honolulu, said yesterday. "There were tears and all kinds of emotion shed over this last night."
Students are being referred to other parish schools, the closest of which are St. Michael's in Waialua and St. Joseph School in Waipahu. Twenty students have already signed on at St. Michael's, Downes said.
Ten teachers, two office staff and the principal are being laid off as of July 31. Sprott said she and her colleagues are not getting severance pay.
Our Lady of Sorrows is the first Catholic school on Oahu to shut its doors since 1989, when Star of the Sea Schools closed its high school. Star of the Sea still operates an elementary school and early learning center. St. Francis School opened a high school on Kauai in 1996 but shut it down after four years. Two other Catholic elementary schools on Kauai closed in 1991.
Facing declining enrollment, 140 Catholic schools nationwide consolidated or closed in the past year, while just 47 new schools opened, and overall enrollment shrank by 63,000 students to 2,553,277, Downes said. In Hawaii, Catholic school enrollment fell back to 11,458 this school year, after spiking slightly to 11,580 in the previous year, he said.
Sprott said she wished people had known sooner that the school was in trouble so they could rally to try to save it. She feels at a loss right now, unsure where to enroll her daughter, Zoe, because she doesn't know where she'll be working.
"I knew enrollment had been declining, but no one ever said the school would close," she said. "The kids never got to say goodbye to each other."
