When Judy Saraceno-Swenson was a student in the early 1970s, Immaculate Heart of Mary High School was the pride of Westchester, a place local parents worked second jobs to afford for their daughters.
“All the girls went to IHM. If you went to a Catholic school, you went there,” said Saraceno-Swenson, 48, a Westchester resident whose three sisters also graduated from the all-girls college prep school.
But three decades later, enthusiasm for Immaculate Heart of Mary has waned, particularly among Westchester moms and dads. This fall, the school will welcome its smallest-ever freshman class, just as administrators are set to decide whether to close IHM for good next June.
“What we’re trying to do is survive here, but if people aren’t choosing us–for a multitude of reasons–the school won’t continue to exist,” IHM President Karen Ristau. “We’re at a crossroads.”
In a recent appeal to graduates, school officials candidly laid out IHM’s prospects.
“If there is to be a future, we will most certainly need extensive and ongoing alumnae support,” they wrote. “Should you feel that the time has come for IHM to close its doors graciously, please say so.”
Alumnae so far have responded with more than $25,000 in donations, one-fifth of what officials hope to raise by December, while only about 4 percent of those answering the June appeal have suggested shuttering the school, Ristau said.
But in recent years, Westchester families have made their feelings clear by voting with their feet, beating a path to other area Catholic schools such as Nazareth Academy in La Grange Park and Montini Catholic High School in Lombard.
IHM, a school that once served more than 1,000 students and in 1987 produced a state-champion girls’ basketball team, will have only about 380 students this year.
Administrators are expecting about 60 freshmen, by far the smallest entering class in IHM’s history, and 40 percent fewer students than this year’s senior class. Less than a quarter will be from Westchester.
“Basically, the perception among Westchester residents is that it’s an average school at best,” said Patricia Dahle, a 1988 IHM graduate who teaches science at the school and is now pitching in as a recruiter. “[Today] we’re not seen as a strong academic school.”
Ristau said the average ACT score, a common academic barometer for area Catholic schools, is not available for IHM, but she acknowledged the school admits students today who may have been turned away 20 years ago.
A recent marketing study showed that race also is a factor in how IHM is perceived locally, school officials said. The high school draws heavily from Cicero and Berwyn and from as far away as the Midway Airport area, contributing to a student body that is roughly one-third white, one-third black and one-third Latino, Ristau said.
IHM officials said those statistics are unsettling to some in Westchester, where more than 80 percent of residents are white and families have long avoided sending their children to Proviso West High School, where whites make up less than 7 percent of the student population.
Karen LaManna, a Westchester mom whose oldest daughter will be an IHM senior this year, said academics and her own experience were more important than race when she opted to send her second daughter to Nazareth as a freshman this fall.
“I have been disappointed over the last three years,” said LaManna, whose daughter has repeatedly attended summer school because of struggles in the classroom. “I feel that they’re pushing [her] along and every year hitting me with a summer school bill. But they’re not trying to get her into appropriate classes.”
Tuition increased to $6,500 this year from $5,600 her daughter’s freshman year, La Manna said. Ristau said 41 percent of students receive financial aid.
Ristau, a former administrator at St. Mary’s College near South Bend, Ind., who is entering the second of a two-year commitment to IHM, acknowledges that not everyone is happy with the high school.
But she points to a popular arts curriculum, honors and advanced-placement classes, and a program that allows students to earn university-level credit through a private Minnesota college as signs that IHM remains vibrant.
Yet Westchester residents aren’t buying the sales pitch. Almost twice as many Westchester girls took the entrance exam at both Nazareth and Montini as tested at IHM in January.
Only 13 of 89 girls who graduated in June from Westchester Middle School and the village’s two parish schools, Divine Infant and Divine Providence, are expected to attend IHM as freshmen this fall, local school officials said. By comparison, 40 Westchester girls are expected to enroll this fall at Nazareth and Montini, officials said.
“We used to send the majority of our girls [to IHM], and that has changed,” said Divine Infant School Principal Leonard Gramarossa. This year, only one is going to IHM. “I do know that the trend has been away from same-sex schools. I don’t know how much that has impacted IHM.”
Ristau said the school’s marketing survey suggests that same-sex education has fallen out of favor with area girls, despite its growing popularity in some national education circles. The Michigan-based religious order that supports IHM is uninterested in operating a co-ed facility or merging with nearby St. Joseph High School, an all-boys school just north of IHM across a shared set of athletic fields, she said.
School board members at St. Joe’s, meanwhile, have approved a contingency plan to go co-ed as early as next fall if IHM opts to close, said President David McCreery. The school of 513 has a racial breakdown similar to IHM’s, and it draws from about 100 feeder schools.
IHM has enough cash reserves to operate for at least two years but officials, wary of spending through that money and incurring debt, want to make a decision by mid-fall about whether to shutter the school, Ristau said.
The key to survival is for IHM to quickly begin attracting more students and winning back alumnae support, school officials said.
“We’re very hopeful right now but it’s scary,” Ristau said. “A mom called me the other day and said, `Can you guarantee my daughter will graduate there?’ and I said no.”
Saraceno-Swenson, the 1973 IHM graduate, said she wishes this year’s appeal for help and the stepped-up marketing campaign had started sooner.
“Fifteen years ago we should have started. I don’t know what happened,” she said. “Now I’m praying there’s a millionaire out there who will donate to our sinking ship.”
