Parents seeking a Catholic education for their kids in Lake County are finding pickings slimmer since the announced closing of Our Lady of Humility. It joins a litany of county parochial schools shuttered by the Chicago Archdiocese.
Archdiocese educators last week announced the closure of the Beach Park school, along with four in Chicago and St. Hubert in Hoffman Estates in Cook County. Officials cited low enrollment and ongoing deficits for closing the six pre-K to eighth-grade schools.
“We made these decisions with heavy hearts after months of discussions with each school. We know the importance of these schools in each community,” Greg Richmond, superintendent of schools for the archdiocese, said in a statement.
The six schools are expected to operate through the remainder of the school year, the archdiocese said. The last day at the Beach Park school on Wadsworth Road, west of North Avenue, is slated for June 3.
Archdiocese educators will help affected OLH families enroll in the Catholic schools still left in the area while helping teachers and staff find employment at other schools in the archdiocese. Despite the OLH closure, the archdiocese still has more than 180 schools in Cook and Lake counties with a student population of 67,000. That’s a far cry from peak enrollment in the mid-1960s of 366,000, according to media reports.
Classes at OLH began in the fall of 1958 with a student body of 146. In the mid-1990s, with continuing growth, additional classrooms and a gymnasium were constructed. Four additional classrooms were opened in 2014.
For OLH families seeking to stay in the Catholic education system, those schools close to Beach Park include St. Patrick’s in Wadsworth and St. Anastasia in Waukegan. Other county parochial grade schools include St. Joseph’s in Libertyville, Prince of Peace in Lake Villa and St. Mary’s in Lake Forest.
Seems about every year the archdiocese moves to close schools, and 2026 is no different. Even when school families meet seemingly impossible metrics to stay open, archdiocese officials order the doors shuttered.
Like St. Bede’s in Ingleside, which was closed in 2024 despite a massive fundraising drive to keep the school open. Archdiocese educators pointed to the school’s failure to meet an enrollment target of 182 students. The school opened in 1958, with the original school razed and rebuilt in 2007.
In just over a month, St. Bede parents and students raised more than $500,000 in a fundraising campaign bolstered by another $400,000 pledged by an individual. That amount still wasn’t good enough for the archdiocese, which also noted the end of the state’s Invest in Kids scholarship program was a contributing factor to the closure.
That program, begun in 2017 and ended in 2023, provided scholarships for low-income students to attend private schools funded through state tax credits. Thousands of Illinois students benefited from it, but the legislature opted not to continue it.
Tuition at OLH is $5,428 this year for one student. Certainly, paying tuition for a Catholic education while paying taxes for public schools is a factor for parents when deciding which school their students should attend. That may offer one reason for declining enrollments at archdiocese schools.
But Catholic educators have been closing schools for decades, starting in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the Lake County portion of the diocese. Immaculate Conception School in Highland Park was one of the first, in 1978.
That was followed by Mother of God, St. Bartholomew and St. Joseph, all on Waukegan’s South Side in 1984. Holy Rosary School in North Chicago was closed in 1990.
Joining the Waukegan closures in 2014 were St. Maria del Popolo in Mundelein, St. James in Highwood in 2015, St. Peter in Antioch in 2016, Holy Cross School in Deerfield in 2018, St. Mary of Annunciation in Fremont Township in 2019 and St. Joseph School in Round Lake in 2020. Then St. Bede and OLH.
Plunging enrollment has dogged archdiocese schools for decades as tuition costs have climbed, while the number of free teachers (priests and nuns) has plummeted. Surely, also hurting the archdiocese have been sex-abuse claims against priests.
Payouts related to those cases have put the archdiocese more than $200 million in debt, according to media reports. Think of how much tuition to Catholic schools could be paid for with that amount, and how many schools in the archdiocese would still be operating.
Charles Selle is a former News-Sun reporter, political editor and editor. sellenews@gmail.com. X @sellenews.
