St. Ann's school to receive $4.5 million

The only Catholic school on Cape Ann is about to get a $4.5 million makeover, courtesy of some big Catholic donors seeking to revive parochial schools in Massachusetts.

Like many Catholic schools statewide, St. Ann School has faced the snowball effect of declining enrollment and skyrocketing tuition rates in recent years. But last week, school officials announced to parents and teachers that they had received a promise of funding from the Archdiocese of Boston for a revitalization.

The school joined the 2010 Initiative, a privately funded program affiliated with the archdiocese that provides money and management to struggling Catholic schools. The money will come over the next 18 months as a fundraising team led by retired ad executive Jack Connors taps wealthy Catholics for large donations.

St. Ann is the first suburban school to be selected for the initiative. It is also the only one that will remain tied to its parish, Holy Family.

Until now, funding in Brockton, South Boston and other areas has focused on creating regional Catholic schools by closing down several and opening a consolidated facility under a new name.

There are no other Catholic schools on Cape Ann with which the archdiocese could have regionalized St. Ann.

"(Cardinal Sean O'Malley) didn't want to see Catholic education leave Cape Ann," said archdiocese spokesman Terry Donilon. "It was really a no-brainer. It had to be done."

The majority of the money will go to much-needed capital improvements for a building that has received little more than fresh paint over the last 100 years. The school expects renovations to be complete in September 2009.

The rest of the money will pay for marketing efforts to boost enrollment and give the school a long-term, sustainable plan for survival. The archdiocese has also committed to cutting tuition next year by $700.

Joining the initiative also allows St. Ann's teachers to receive continuing education at Merrimack College in North Andover free of charge, a move that officials say will help the school keep its curriculum current.

"Everything the 2010 Initiative talks about doing were things we had dreamed about for years and years and years," said the Rev. Timothy Harrison, co-pastor of Holy Family Parish.

Tuition at St. Ann has floated out of the average working family's grasp over the past few years, jumping 158 percent from $1,625 in 2000 to $4,208 this year.

In response, enrollment in the kindergarten to eighth-grade school has declined from 199 to 126 students in the same period, creating a financial conundrum for the parish.

Meanwhile, costs have risen as fewer people become nuns or priests, who had traditionally staffed the schools for free. St. Ann was established by the Sisters of Mercy in 1885, but today the seven teachers at St. Ann are paid laypeople. The only nun at the school is its principal, Sister Judith O'Brien.

"We would have been in a deficit budget for the year, for sure," said Harrison. "And it would have been a very difficult year for us."

Management of the school, run by Harrison and the other co-pastor, the Rev. Ronald Gariboldi, will be charged to a board that will include the pastors and other church officials, as well as local businesspeople.

The board has not yet been established, but an interim committee includes local bankers, a developer and parents of alumni, O'Brien said.

"We are asking pastors to do way too much,"Donilon said. "They are intimately involved and they will have a very strong presence going forward. They just won't have to do it alone, and hopefully they won't have to do it with Band-Aids and glue."

The co-pastors at Holy Family, which emerged from the consolidation of St. Ann, Sacred Heart and St. Peter parishes in Gloucester and St. Joachim in Rockport three years ago, say much of their focus is diverted to keeping their parish united and attendance up.

Under the board's leadership, the school will move to a professional style of management, school officials said, establishing a development officer and an endowment and boosting enrollment to get the school to a self-sustaining level of 225 students. Currently, Harrison describes the school's budget as "hand to mouth."

"We really want to see Catholic education survive here, so certainly the authority thing does not concern us," Gariboldi said.

St. Ann will receive renovations that O'Brien called "extensive," though she has not met with an architect to determine details. She hopes that some of the school's character will remain, such as its original wood floors and woodwork, but she looks forward to banishing the three separate heating systems and just having one.

The school has no cafeteria. Students bring their lunch and eat in their classrooms — a tradition O'Brien plans to keep even after renovations. Any additions to the building will be minor, she said; maybe some extra classroom space for an extended kindergarten and a fine arts room for music and dance.

St. Ann has educated six generations of Cape Ann families, mostly from Gloucester and Rockport. Dee McCormack, a Florida native, began sending her oldest daughter here when the family moved to Gloucester 15 years ago, and has since enrolled all six of her children at the school.

"It's fabulous news," said McCormack of the funding and tuition reductions. "The first thing to go when times are hard is paying for a private school."

Like many students, McCormack's children have gone on to Catholic high schools, including St. John's Prep in Danvers and Bishop Fenwick in Peabody.

O'Brien said the funding has enabled St. Ann to reduce tuition by $700, to $3,500 for next year, and that enrollment is already increasing, though she did not have details. A new Web site will be launched Monday and a professional marketing firm will help St. Ann's administrators with their mission.

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