From the Times-Leader, January 20, 2007:

School was created after bishop closed Sacred Heart in 2005

St. Rose Academy offers hope

By MARK GUYDISH

mguydish@timesleader.com

 

MAYFIELD – On the banks of the Lackawanna River, amid 20 landscaped acres, sits a model of what can happen when the Diocese of Scranton closes a high school that parents refuse to let die. It is St. Rose Academy, a phoenix risen from the ashes of Bishop Joseph Martino’s 2005 decision to shutter Sacred Heart High School in Carbondale.

Barely a year and half old, St. Rose has rapidly become the rallying cry of some local parents disgruntled with Martino’s Wednesday announcement that four Luzerne County high schools – Bishop Hafey in Hazleton, Seton Catholic in Pittston, Bishop O’Reilly in Kingston and Bishop Hoban in Wilkes-Barre – will be consolidated into a new school housed in the current Hoban building.

At a meeting Thursday of O’Reilly supporters, several suggested contacting St. Rose to learn more.

The school’s origins stretch back to 2004, when a newly installed Bishop Martino created a commission to determine the fate of Sacred Heart. The commission drew in other people from the community and from Sacred Heart, said St. Rose director Charlie Barlow, and when the decision to close Sacred Heart was announced in February 2005, many of those people “became the core” of a movement to reopen a new school for the students.

“The first hope was that we would be able to remain in that building and take over governance and financial responsibility for it as private academic institution,” Barlow said.

But the bishop didn’t allow it.

So they hunted for a new location while the diocese put the old Sacred Heart building up for sale.

They found a home in what had been a vocational-technical school which, in turn, had been taken over by an environmental research group. That group “got government grants and put $10 million into it,” Barlow said. The improved building was then leased out to several businesses, and the St. Rose Academy founders decided to rent space for their nascent high school. They have been successful enough, Barlow added, that they expect to purchase the entire building shortly. They will then be able to use the rental income from the other businesses to support the school.

Barlow said it is his understanding that the old Sacred Heart High School structure is still on the market.

St. Rose is a “private school licensed by the state in the Catholic tradition,” Barlow stressed. It is not a charter school – a type of public school that receives money from the state but free of many restrictions – because such schools cannot espouse any religion. And it cannot call itself a “Catholic school” because it does not fall under the bishop’s purview.

“Philosophically and theologically we are fulfilling the same mission, we just don’t do it under their governance,” Barlow said. “We’re certainly not doing anything against the teachings of the Church or the diocese.”

St. Rose remains free of affiliation with any religious group, but it does have one religious sister on the teaching staff. It survives on donations, fundraising and tuition, which is $4,000 a year for grades 9 through 12 and $1,785 for grades 7 and 8.

“We try to be pretty competitive with schools in the diocese.”

It is a small school that, Barlow admits, “needs to grow,” and so far that growth has been a bit elusive. The state Department of Education listed the school’s total enrollment for 2005-2006 at 58 students, but Barlow said that was at the start of the year. By the end of last year there were 70 students, with 29 graduating, and they won a total of almost $1 million in college scholarships. This year they picked up enough new students to keep the total enrollment at about 70.

Being free of diocese control has both helped and hurt recruitment. As a standalone institution, St. Rose has no “feeder schools,” elementary schools expected to encourage students to move on to St. Rose. It also cannot actively recruit in the diocesan schools. On the other hand, the diocese cannot stop them from marketing in areas previously off limits.

“Under the diocese we were restricted from recruiting in Lackawanna Valley,” Barlow said. “That does not apply now.”

As a new and small school, St. Rose lacks many of the draws found in well-established, bigger institutions. The sports program is fledgling but growing, with boys and girls basketball teams that are, Barlow concedes, often barely big enough to field a full team with one or two reserves. But golf and soccer have been added and are expected to expand, and a new sports dome is in the works.

Advanced Placement courses have begun to seep in, with the first course, biology, about to begin.

Still, Barlow is optimistic. The school Web site is sophisticated and upbeat, the finances are solid enough to continue expansion, and the whole experience should stand as an example to parents and school supporters mulling the launch of a private school in Luzerne County. Barlow said the St. Rose experience has some striking parallels to Bishop Hafey in Hazleton, where students are expected to travel either 12 miles south to Marian Catholic High School in Tamaqua or 25 miles north to the new central high school in Wilkes-Barre.

“Our concern and argument was that there was a significant number of Catholics who wouldn’t have a Catholic high school,” Barlow said. Without Sacred Heart, there was no such institution from the New York border to Scranton. St. Rose is trying to fill that need, with or without the diocese, and the founders were not only capable of making it happen in about six months after the announcement that Sacred Heart would close, they’ve been able to keep the momentum and keep expanding the facility.

“It’s one of those things when you say, ‘if God had a plan …’” Barlow said, deliberately not finishing the thought.