Catholic schools leaders take plan to rearrange where students attend grade school to parents

QUINCY — Christopher Gill was prepared to hear negative feedback from parents of elementary school students on Tuesday at Quincy University’s Connie Niemann Center when they learned of the Quincy Catholic Elementary Schools’ (QCES) proposal for a new working facility plan.

That’s OK, he says.

“That’s why we’re calling it a working plan,” Gill, chief administrative leader of QCES, said in an interview with Muddy River News before Tuesday’s meeting. “Let’s see what the community has to say. Let’s see if they have any other ideas that we didn’t think about or if there are any issues that we need to address before implementing. 

“What we don’t want is, ‘I don’t like it,’ and someone sits down. I mean, that’s fine that you don’t like it, but do you have another idea, another thought? What don’t you like about it? We believe that this facilities plan addresses the concerns that are facing Quincy Catholic education.”

The plan calls for Quincy’s four K-8 Catholic grade schools — Blessed Sacrament, St. Anthony, St. Francis and St. Peter — to continue to be used as attendance centers. However, Blessed Sacrament and St. Dominic will be used for preschool and kindergarten for the 2025-26 school year. St. Francis will be the site for all students in grades 1-4, and St. Peter will be the site for all students in grades 5-8.

The plan was created by the Provisional Advisory Board. Members are:

• Andrew Mays and Amy Siebers from St. Peter
• Brian Dreier and Aaron Weiman from St. Francis
• Chris Wiemelt and Jacob Tadeo from Blessed Sacrament
• Dan Reichert and Donna Richmiller from St. Anthony/St. Dominic
• Erin Frazier from the Quincy Catholic Elementary Schools
• Terry Ellerman from Quincy Notre Dame

Gill and QCES Executive Director Sara Reuschel are ex-officio members of the board.

Gill said the plan addresses concerns facing Catholic education in Quincy, which he said are enrollment growth, inconsistent academic services, competition among the K-8 schools and budgetary issues.

Gill said enrollment is “stagnant” in the four schools. He believes the creation of the two preschool centers for children ages 3-4, instead of offering preschool at each parish school, will spur growth.

“We will have room to grow (at Blessed Sacrament and St. Dominic),” he said. “We’ll be able to offer more rooms for preschool. What we were hearing from families is that they want to get their kids out of daycare and into preschool, but there are just limited spaces.”

Gill said 163 students are participating in preschool this year, an increase of 26 from the 2023-24 school year, while 93 students are in kindergarten.

“We can’t grow much further than that (number) under the current situation,” he said. “To take over classrooms or add on the buildings takes lots of money.”

Gill said each student in the Catholic schools (who is a member of a registered and actively participating family) pays the same tuition — $3,400 for one child, $4,975 for two children and $5,500 for three or more. However, the academic services offered at each K-8 school are not the same.

“If I’m at St. Peter, my child has access to counseling, access to a full-time academic interventionist and access to a new STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) lab,” he said. “Students at St. Dominic, who are paying the same tuition, don’t have access to any of that.

“Some schools have full-time music teachers. Some of them have part-time music teachers. Some don’t have any music teachers at all. We’re going to equalize services, so it doesn’t matter where you go. You’re going to get the same things with your child.”

Gill believes the proposal addresses the battle for students at each school.

“When you see enrollment go up in one school, you typically see enrollment go down in another school,” he said. “We’re robbing Peter to pay Paul. We’re not on the same page. 

Even as we’ve tried to normalize tuition, and even though we’re Catholic, which is all about universal and it’s all about community, we’re very competitive. You know, people are saying, ‘Well, we got better test scores here’ or ‘We’re more Catholic than they are’ or ‘We’re doing this for Catholic Schools Week and you’re not.’ You know, it runs the gamut.

“We’re fighting each other, and we need to be all under one umbrella.  It’s not what the Catholic faith is about. We are fighting each other, and we really should be about the formation of our children and the next generation of Catholic disciples of Christ.”

St. Peter has 425 students this year, followed by St. Francis (208), Blessed Sacrament (178) and St. Dominic (156). Gill said the new working facility plan should create student-to-teacher ratios that will not exceed 22-to-1.

Catholic schools enrollment: 2014-25

Gill anticipates a handful of teacher retirements if the proposal is implemented.

“Other dioceses that have done something similar have all told us, ‘Just be prepared. You’re going get some people retiring,’” he said. “We’ll probably save some money through that way, but we do think we’re going need (all of the teachers). We don’t expect to lay off anybody.”

Gill also believes implementing this proposal now will help parishes struggling with finances. He said three of the four parishes, which help subsidize the cost of education, have not hit budget goals for the past five years.

“If you have multiple kids the church is paying for, that’s a lot of money,” Gill said. “We can’t put our heads in the sand and think that this problem is going to go away. We are going to have to make some sort of decision relatively soon. If it’s not this plan, then it needs to be something else.

“I don’t think we can continue doing business as usual. The current business model is not sustainable, not in the environment that we are in right now. What we don’t want to do is get to a point where the future dictates our response, like we’re at a point where suddenly one of the pastors says, ‘We can’t afford to keep the school. We have to close it.’ Then you’re in crisis mode. Then you’re trying to react.”

Gill said transportation concerns have yet to be addressed. He said 14 percent of Catholic school students have registered to use the busses provided by Quincy Public Schools. He admitted that staggered start times at each school and the use of shuttle busses to help families get their children to class each morning are being considered.

A second meeting is scheduled for Wednesday at the Connie Niemann Center for people who didn’t attend Tuesday’s meeting. The Provisional Advisory Board is scheduled to meet next week to review comments made at the two meetings and the results of a survey that will be on the QCES website.

“I imagine it’s going to take at least a couple of board meetings for us to wade through everything before they can agree on a plan that can go to (the parish pastors),” Gill said. 

He hopes the parish pastors will vote on the proposal at the end of October or the beginning of November. 

“I don’t want people to think that this (proposal) was just 10 people getting together over a course of a couple of days,” Gill said. “This has been years in the making. This advisory board was formed from a leadership team that started back in 2011, and the questions back then were, ‘How can we collaborate more? How do we address some shared concerns?’

“So many people have put in hours upon hours of work, looking at financial data, pedagogy, data and research surveys. What I worry about is some people think, ‘Oh, you guys just kind of dreamed this up in the last couple of months.’ No, we’re talking about the last couple of years.”