Protest held following closure announcement of Blessed Sacrament School
Faculty and staff received news on Friday via email that Blessed Sacrament School will be closing its doors at the end of the current school year.
The Erie Catholic School System said this decision was based on a drop in enrollment numbers since the school joined the system around 2017 — The decline was over 50%.
One parent said she was shocked by the news.
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'It was first a shock, obviously. You start to run through those feelings of shock and sadness. We are a very tight school community but I think too once we really start thinking about the reasons and what was told to us, we started to look a little harder,' said Colleen Hanson, a parent of students at Blessed Sacrament School.
Hanson said one of the things that was noted was that the school is not pulling enough children within the 16502 zip code, which is also the zip code of the school.
'All schools have access to different things. We have talked recently about some schools have a busing [system], they can use that for various events. Our school does not have access to that. So we pay the same amount, but we don't have the same access to the same things,' said Hanson.
Another parent said the school teaches valuable aspects that should be accessible to all children.
'We give them a sense of structure and stability and some of our kids don't have that. This should be offered to everyone in Erie. This should be something that the city kids have as their safety net, and it should be available to everybody,' said Christina Erven, a parent of students at Blessed Sacrament School.
The pastor of the Blessed Sacrament Parish said the decades-old school closing is a huge loss not only for Erie but for the Catholic community.
'What we're doing is, we're looking at, is putting out people that can't afford or won't be able to go to another Catholic school,' said Father Philip Pinczewski, pastor at the Blessed Sacrament Parish.
He said this decision is not what the parish is about as gospel people.
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'The board of directors looks at numbers, corporate talk, but not about the heart, the relationships or the gospel,' said Pinczewski. 'The relationships that are forged in school come over to the parish too, so it supplies and gives life to the parish. So the board didn't look at that and of course, I had no input into it.'
Hanson said the school closing will impact families in this area of the city and will have a lasting effect in keeping those families together.
'One of the biggest concerns is that I have heard through the meeting that they had with the faculty and staff is that there is no guarantee that families will be able to stay together. So for me as a working mom it's going to be virtually impossible with the limited school transportation,' said Hanson.
'I think that this is the ideal Catholic school. This is what we truly are and I wish that we would just have a chance, even one more year, to be able to get our enrollment up, to be able to even make other plans to break off and may go back to our church,' said Erven.
A meeting will take place on Tuesday, February 18 at 6 p.m. in the school cafeteria with the Erie Catholic School System.
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