And then there was one.
With the announcement this week that Queen of Peace High School in Burbank would be closing its doors at the end of the school year, Southland parents who prefer a single-sex Catholic education for their high school daughters are down to a lone option.
Mother McAuley High School in Mount Greenwood, one of the largest single-sex high schools in the nation, will be the Southland’s last all-girls high school standing come fall, following the closures of Maria High School in Marquette Park in 2013, Mount Assisi Academy in Lemont in 2014 and now Queen of Peace in 2017.
Heidi Gutierrez, the mother of a junior at Queen of Peace who places a premium on a Catholic education, said the impending closure of her daughter’s school left them with few good choices. If her daughter were to remain at a nearby Catholic school, she would be forced to select between one that is much larger than her current school or another that is even larger than that and also has boys.
“Our only options really are Marist and Mother McAuley, and she doesn’t like how big they are and how she’s just a number,” said Gutierrez, who lives in Oak Lawn. “At Queen of Peace, you’re a name, and every teacher knows your name, and you know every student.”
Margaret Hayes, principal of St. Linus Catholic School in Oak Lawn, said she believes numerous local students will face a similar dilemma in coming years.
While none of St. Linus’ eighth-grade girls took the entrance exam offered recently at Queen of Peace, Hayes said she thinks some students currently in sixth and seventh grade would have flourished in the school’s smaller environment.
“We have a lot of parents that were saddened that Queen of Peace is closing,” said Hayes, a former dean at the school. “It’s always good to have more choices.”
By contrast, Catholic boys high schools have maintained a significant presence in the Southland.
Five all-male Catholic high schools remain options for local parents: Brother Rice in Mount Greenwood, St. Rita in Ashburn, Mount Carmel in Woodlawn, Leo in Auburn Gresham and St. Laurence in Burbank.
Of those, Leo, with 143 students, is easily the smallest. The predominantly black school has long been rumored to be a candidate for closure or relocation, but school administrators are optimistic that Leo may be turning a corner. It’s added two-dozen students since last year and is hoping for another bump in enrollment next year on its way to a three-year goal of enrolling 200 students, Leo President Dan McGrath said.
“We’re in fairly good shape,” he said this week, referring to the school’s financial outlook. “We’re never going to be flush, but we’re always going to do everything in our power to keep Leo going because we really believe it’s a necessity in our part of the city.”
Some local administrators attribute the divergent outcomes at single-sex Catholic high schools in the Southland to the difficulties all-female schools face fundraising from alumni — women, on average, earn less than men — and attracting students without the luxury of a high-profile athletics program that, in addition to luring top athletes, can bring in money of its own.
Carol Ann MacGregor, a sociology professor at Loyola University New Orleans who studies the causes and consequences of the closure of Catholic schools across the country, said she wasn’t aware of any empirical data on the effect student gender played on a school’s survival, but she noted there was plenty of anecdotal evidence to support the assumption that boys schools had an easier time raising money.
While the drastic decline of all-girls Catholic high school options in the Southland is striking, and while fundraising and athletics may have played some role in driving it, the current state of single-sex education in the area appears to be more of a local anomaly than a diocese-wide trend.
After Queen of Peace closes, the Archdiocese of Chicago, overall, will have an identical number of all-male and all-female high schools, with eight apiece.
The gender split seen in the Southland actually reverses in the northern parts of Cook County, where all-male Catholic high schools are few and far between, but all-girls schools are more prevalent.
Nationally, all-female Catholic high schools outnumber all-male ones 134 to 102, according to National Center for Education Statistics data.
The real shift across the archdiocese has not been toward one gender or another but away from single-sex Catholic schools altogether, archdiocese spokeswoman Anne Maselli said.
Since 1997, the archdiocese has lost seven all-boys high schools and 10 all-girls high schools but gained four co-ed high schools as a result of single-sex schools merging, Maselli said.
Next school year there will be more co-ed Catholic high schools in the archdiocese than single-sex ones. Twenty years ago, there were nearly three times as many single-sex schools, she said.
Changes in the makeup of student bodies at local Catholic schools mirror a national trend. As single-sex Catholic schools across the country falter financially, they’ve merged and moved toward co-ed models, MacGregor said.
“Merging is definitely the first thing, the first step,” she said. “The consolidation of a single-sex school is better than losing both of the schools, in a worst-case scenario.”
It’s not clear, MacGregor said, whether a general preference for co-ed education is also in part driving that shift.
For some parents and students, the co-ed experience is an asset.
“A lot of times, girls prefer a co-ed environment,” said Hayes, the St. Linus principal.
Others, like Bill Figel, a Beverly resident who attended an all-boys Catholic high school and sent all three of his children through single-sex Catholic high schools in the area, are advocates for separating the sexes.
“The opposite sex is a distraction, so taking it out of the equation as a high school boy, at least during school hours, was productive for me,” said Figel, a 1972 graduate of Leo High School. “My classroom time needed my undivided attention, and for me personally, that wouldn’t have been the case in a co-ed setting.”
Kim Joyce Geraghty, a 1982 Mother McAuley graduate who has sent two girls through the school, also is an advocate for single-sex education and its capacity to empower young women.
“Mother McAuley does an amazing and, in my opinion, the best job of conveying to the young women that they can be anything they want to be and do any job out there,” she said.
Geraghty said seeing women in positions of power and leadership — both Mother McAuley’s principal and school president are women — is critical in empowering girls.
She said she believes the school equips young women with the confidence to fight for what they deserve in life and to take on issues like workplace discrimination, pay inequity and sexual harassment that they may face in their future careers.
But even Mother McAuley, soon to be the last remaining all-girls school in the Southland, has not been immune to the enrollment decline seen in so many Catholic schools across the Chicagoland area and the nation.
While the school is likely to gain some students next year from Queen of Peace’s closure, Mother McAuley, with its 973 students, is nowhere near the enrollment it boasted years ago when the student body numbered more than 2,000.
“Most Catholic schools have seen a decline over the years, which can be attributed to a number of economic and demographic factors,” Mother McAuley President Mary Acker Klingenberger said.
Bob Rakow is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.
zkoeske@tribpub.com
Twitter @ZakKoeske
