SHUFFLING STUDENTS
After shutdown, one of St. Joseph’s buildings will be used for Kingston Catholic grades 6-8
KINGSTON, N.Y. » Though St. Joseph’s School will cease to exist at the end of the current academic year, one of its two buildings in Uptown Kingston will continue to be used for Catholic education, an Archdiocese of New York official said Thursday.
Timothy McNiff, the superintendent of schools for the archdiocese, said the newer of the school’s two buildings at Wall and Pearl streets will become the middle school portion of Kingston Catholic School, which currently has all of its classes in a building on lower Broadway in the city.
The archdiocese did not reveal this portion of the plan when it told the St. Joseph’s community and the Freeman on Wednesday that St. Joseph’s was closing. It merely said all of the students at St. Joseph’s would be offered enrollment in Kingston Catholic.
Archdiocese spokesman Nick Iacono said midday Thursday that St. Joseph’s families would be notified later in the day about Kingston Catholic’s grades six through eight moving to the Uptown building.
The Kingston Catholic building on lower Broadway, cur-
rently a K-8 school, will house only grades kindergarten through five starting this fall, Iacono said.
McNiff, in a phone interview Thursday morning, said that with the expected 2017-18 enrollment down to 90 students and a deficit too large to be erased by tuition payments, there was no choice but to close St. Joseph’s School, which dates back 105 years.
“We put some extra effort into marketing and recruitment with the intention we wanted to keep the school open, but the enrollment numbers just have not moved,” he said.
McNiff said the decision to close St. Joseph’s was made in the “last couple of weeks” after reviewing whether the marketing efforts had been successful.
He said the school’s yearly tuition of $5,275 per student is insufficient to bring down the deficit, even if supplemented by fundraising efforts, though he declined to divulge the size of the deficit.
Kingston Catholic’s yearly tuition is $4,436, and McNiff said that school’s enrollment has grown from 187 in 2007 to 252 now.
St. Joseph’s enrollment has fallen from 261 in 2007 to 146 this year, he said.
McNiff said the archdiocese is trying to find new positions for some of the 10 full-time and four part-time teacher at St. Joseph’s.
Some of the them could be reassigned within the 211 schools operated by the Archdiocese of New York — which encompasses Manhattan, the Bronx, Staten Island and seven upstate counties — but “we will not have the opportunity to reemploy all teachers at St. Joseph’s,” McNiff said.
The archdiocese originally planned to close St. Joseph’s at the end of the 2012-13 school year but reversed that decision in February 2013.
When that shutdown still was expected, the school said it would seek permission from the archdiocese to operate it as an independent Catholic school, like John A. Coleman Catholic High School in the town of Ulster.
McNiff said the independent model probably wouldn’t work for St. Joseph’s now, especially because of the short amount of time remaining before the 2017-18 school year begins.
“To pull something off like that now, no I don’t see it possible in any way,” he said.
The planned shutdown of Coleman was announced by the archdiocese in February 2001, giving the school more time before the following school year to reorganize as an independent institution.
Coleman, the only Catholic high school in Ulster County, continues to operate independently today.
McNiff said the older of the two St. Joseph’s buildings in Uptown Kingston, on the same block at St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church, will no longer be used as an archdiocese school.
“We will not use the older building, and that will be available to the parish to use as they see fit,” he said.