The Cardinal Gibbons School is due to close in June, but sophomore Brady Fischer can't see trading Crusaders red for the purple togs of the rival Gaels of nearby Mount St. Joseph High School. His parents, meanwhile, have overruled his proposal to enroll at Archbishop Spalding in Severn, at least partly because, like Gibbons, it's operated by the Archdiocese of Baltimore, and they're still angry that the archdiocese is shutting Gibbons down.
"I'm not giving them a penny," Jayne Fischer said.
The Elkridge family is one of hundreds across the archdiocese wrestling with economics, logistics, faith, school loyalties and hurt feelings as they make plans for the 2,152 students to be displaced when the archdiocese closes 13 schools at the end of the academic year.
Families at Gibbons - the only high school on the list - have until today to send applications to the Catholic high schools that the archdiocese has identified as "receiving schools." Grade schools have set varying admissions deadlines, up to the start of the new academic year in September.
Some families have submitted applications; others are still making up their minds. Some plan to stay with a Catholic school; others are leaving the fold. In a system of roughly 21,000 students, some families and alumni are still holding out hope of reversing the closings announced early this month. They are part of a school reorganization plan that Archbishop Edwin F. O'Brien said is necessary to sustain the system in the face of rising costs and declining enrollments.
Officially, the archdiocese says its goal is to keep all the displaced students in the system, but Monsignor Bob Hartnett, who headed the reorganization plan, says he would consider it a success if three-quarters of them return in the fall. The archdiocese has designated schools to take in displaced students, held fairs for families to meet with administrators and teachers and pledged to work with families on differences in tuition.
Mary L. Bunting has secured a spot for her daughter, Mary Beth, in the eighth grade at St. Augustine in Elkridge. Her son, Paul, is on a waiting list for the fourth grade there.
The Halethorpe woman likes St. Augustine for the "same community feel as Ascension," where her children currently are enrolled. But if Paul doesn't get in, she said, she won't consider another Catholic school.
"We are looking into public school for him," said Bunting. "I can't understand why the archdiocese is willing to lose any of these students."
Camille Burke hasn't made a decision about the next step for her daughter. She said Akira Tisdale, a fifth-grader at Mother Mary Lange on the East Side, "loves the school for the sense of family and community. I like the phenomenal staff."
The Park Heights woman went to a school fair earlier this month looking for options. While she said several Catholic schools were good prospects, she's also taking a close look at the public Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women. Her daughter is on its waiting list for middle school. If that doesn't work out, Burke said, she might move to Baltimore County and enroll Akira in public school there.
"I am so disheartened and disenchanted with the archdiocese right now," she said. "My whole family, we are all products of Catholic education, and I wanted that for my daughter. But now it is highly unlikely."
When the closings were announced March 3, the archdiocese issued a list designating "receiving schools," and said that no student would have to travel more than five miles from their current school.
But the list that was first issued did not cover Gibbons. And it did not name the new location for the system's PRIDE program, which now offers classes for children with learning disabilities at Mother Mary Lange and Sacred Heart of Mary schools. Both of those schools are set to close.
Stacie Bahr was relieved to get the word just last week that the programs will be moving to St. Clement Mary Hofbauer in Rosedale. That's a bit closer to her Rosedale home than Sacred Heart of Mary, where her son, Alex, has been taking PRIDE classes since last year. He's been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder.
"It's been a long three weeks," Bahr said at the kitchen table, as she rubbed her face with her hands. "It's very overwhelming."
While she worries that Alex, who struggles with reading comprehension, will have difficulty adjusting to the new school and to possibly losing his PRIDE teacher, she said "I'm kind of OK with the decision" to continue at St. Clement.
Gibbons families are facing other complications. While the average tuition at the receiving grade schools is lower than that of the schools that are closing, most of the receiving high schools are more expensive than Gibbons.
Gibbons Principal David Brown said the families with whom he has spoken are most concerned about the tuition cost of a new school. About 40 percent of the school's 290 students now receive some form of help paying the tuition, which runs $9,800 a year.
Tuition at the 10 Catholic high schools listed as receiving schools ranges from about $2,500 for the Corporate Internship Program at Cristo Rey in the city to more than $14,000 at Loyola Blakefield in Towson. The archdiocese says Gibbons students will be able to take their aid with them wherever they go, but that doesn't address differences in cost at a more expensive school.
Spokesman Sean Caine said the archdiocese is urging Gibbons families to fill out the Private School Aid Service application so that decisions about assistance based on need and household income can be made for the fall.
After money, Brown said, "the second concern is that they won't get their first choice. ... The parents feel like they're in kind of a lottery."
Among the receiving high schools, there are more than enough slots to accommodate the roughly 300 students who would have been expecting to attend Gibbons in the fall. But no school has agreed to accept more than 72 students - Archbishop Curley would take 18 students for each grade - and Loyola Blakefield has said it has room for no more than nine.
Because the 10 schools are scattered between Annapolis and Harford County, Brown said, "transportation definitely becomes an issue" for many families. The archdiocese does not provide buses, but Caine said that could change in the fall depending on how the need shapes up.
The two receiving schools farthest from Gibbons are John Carroll in Bel Air and St. Mary's in Annapolis, which are 35 and 29 miles away, respectively. The closest is Mount St. Joseph, less than 3 miles away.
For the Fischer family, Mount St. Joseph would be easy in terms of transportation, and they might be able to manage the tuition increase of $1,000. But Brady Fischer, who plays football and lacrosse for the Crusaders, won't hear of it.
"I cannot play any sort of sport for my rival sports school," said Brady, 16, the oldest of three brothers and the only one now in Catholic school. "It's impossible."
For reasons of logistics, cost or comfort, the family has scratched out most of the other Catholic school options. Brady would be willing to go to Archbishop Spalding, where he has a friend and knows a coach, but his parents have ruled it out for several reasons. There's the location, their feeling that the large co-ed school - nearly 1,200 students - would be much like a public high school, and not least because it's run by the archdiocese. Mount St. Joseph is not.
Brady's father, Chris, is particularly upset about how Gibbons has been treated by the archdiocese.
"In my opinion they walked away from their people," said Chris, who did not attend Catholic schools himself. "The Catholic Church is what it is because of their people."
When the closing was announced, Chris Fischer demanded that Brady withdraw from Gibbons immediately. He was angry, but he was also thinking Brady needed to find another school as soon as possible to have any chance of making a varsity football squad in the fall. Family discussions since then have calmed.
Brady went to St. Augustine through eighth grade, then to Gibbons. He said the religious values at Gibbons have been as important to him as the camaraderie possible in a small school for boys.
Now, it seems likely he'll be enrolling at Howard High School in Ellicott City, a coeducational school of some 1,600 students, where his middle brother, Breccan, is a freshman.
Brady has friends at Howard and is getting used to the idea. He is thinking about football workouts starting in the summer, although he imagines the competition for a varsity slot will be more difficult.
Joe Klima comes from a Gibbons family. The junior, who has attended the school since sixth grade, was just inducted into the National Honor Society, planned to continue playing lacrosse on the varsity squad and expected to be elected senior class president. Now he is hoping to transfer to Spalding.
"The worst thing for me is that I won't graduate with my buddies," he said. "I feel like the rug has been pulled out from under me. I will be the only one in two generations of my family who doesn't graduate from here."
His father, Bruz Klima, who volunteers as director of alumni relations, said he has not given up hope for his alma mater. The family had planned to join a candlelight vigil that drew more than 100 people to the Baltimore Basilica Friday evening, hoping to get the attention of Archbishop Edwin F. O'Brien.
Lisa Saloka, whose daughter will be switching from Ascension to St. Augustine, said such appeals seem futile.
"This process has shown me one thing," the Halethorpe woman said. "The Archdiocese is not a democracy. It is a dictatorship."