So I had a long chat with my husband over dinner (yes, a rare treat of dinner out, the two of us; even though it’s a weeknight, the kids are off school, so we neither have to play homework cop nor shuttle them to activities), and he talked me into a more optimistic view of Catholic schools.
If you recall, in my prior post I had fretted over the “opportunity cost” of substantial time commitment of Catholic school parents, that time time spent volunteering directly at the school or working on fundraisers could otherwise be used to volunteer in other, more genuinely “charitable” ways. But here’s what my husband pointed out: in the first place, it’s not a sure thing these “volunteering man-hours” would have otherwise been directed towards, say, the local food pantry; quite likely, this is time that otherwise would have been spent at the Wellness Center* or the golf course. And even if so, if you measure the net benefit to society, every student at a parochial school is a net plus to the taxpayers who have one less student to fund, and at $13,000 a pop, that’s not insignificant. So even if these students’ parents money and volunteer energy goes to the school rather than to some more authentically charitable cause, it’s still a win, and all those other taxpayers who pay less than they otherwise would — well, they could just as well pony up the “saved” money and contribute it somewhere, but, of course, they won’t see it that way.
(The Wellness Center is the upscale fitness club near us, very popular with church families.)
But besides that — you know Republicans are always moaning that their tax cut plans aren’t properly “scored” by the CBO because they don’t acknowledge the boost their cuts will give to the economy, increasing GDP, decreasing welfare spending, and increasing revenues indirectly? (To which I say: “don’t count your chickens before they hatch.”) Well, my husband persuaded me, though without using the term directly, to apply “dynamic scoring” to the issue of Catholic schools (at least when the school is primarily supported by the school families and the parish, and the students are primarily church families).
Having a school attached to the parish doesn’t (necessarily) suck out all volunteering availability. Instead, it has the potential to build community by increasing the extent to which the church/school “complex” is a 7-day-a-week place, and those tighter community bonds can produce more involvement by parishoners, both individually and as families — and this “culture of involvement,” though established and reinforced by the school, can extend beyond that to families who send their kids to public schools, for whatever reason. (And here that can be for multiple reasons: financial, to be sure, or simply due to lack of a parochial school family tradition, or because one or more of the children have a special need, beyond the moderate needs the school can provide for, for which they need the services of the public school.)
And this is where my husband brought in his experiences in Germany: there are a great many reasons why churches in Germany, and in Europe in general, are struggling to be something other than a senior center with a Sunday liturgy attached, and churches here are doing much better, but he speculated that the tradition of Catholic schools might play a role.
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