Finance plan ruffling parents

By Leslie Brody
Record
March 9, 2014

http://www.northjersey.com/news/249170081_Finance_plan_ruffling_parents.html

Reports that Archbishop John J. Myers was enhancing his retirement home at the expense of the archdiocese has outraged some parents who were already fuming about his plan to take over the financial operations of Catholic elementary schools.

The details of Myers' half-million-dollar expansion showed that church leadership "was not a trustworthy steward of our hard-earned treasure," said one mother whose children attend a parochial school in Bergen County.

The archdiocese has been pushing a campaign called Lighting the Way to exert more authority over roughly 70 parish schools in Bergen, Hudson, Essex and Union counties, starting in July.

Pastors whose parishes have elementary schools were urged to sign contracts in recent months that would give the archdiocese much more control over school budgets, hiring and curriculum than it had in the past.

Indeed, the central office in Newark will start to process bills for the schools using their tuition accounts.

Archdiocese officials said centralization would increase efficiency and help schools survive at a time of dwindling enrollment and rising costs.

But some parents balked at the plan, saying it was drawn up without their input. They also expressed fears that their schools would lose funding and that their ability to raise donations would suffer because of skepticism about the changes.

"Lighting the Way takes the parents out of the equation to have any meaningful say in curriculum, finance and governance" of their schools, said the mother. "It says write the tuition check and shut up."

Several parents expressed dismay but said they were afraid to be identified as criticizing the centralization plan for fear their children would be expelled in retaliation.

A board member of a Catholic school in Bergen County said that parents were "disgusted" by the home expansion and concerned that the archdiocese would not give schools detailed, accurate accountings of how their tuition fees and donations were being used.

The board member said his pastor was told that if he didn't sign the new management contract, it would be signed by someone at the archbishop's office.

"This tastes bad," he said. "It's not about saving Catholic schools, it's about destroying Catholic schools."

Jim Goodness, spokesman for the archdiocese, said that the central office would be transparent in accounting and that donations to an individual school would go to that school's account.

He said he did not recall anyone saying that if a pastor did not sign the contract, someone else would.

Goodness said parents who were nervous about the changes would get used to the new system.

"It's moderately different than what had been done before, so naturally some people are unsure," he said. "They're going to have to see it to believe it."

In the past, pastors decided how much parish money supplemented the school's annual budget.

But under Lighting the Way, schools will have to apply to the archdiocese for grants.