Running parallel to the public school system in the Triangle is a group of Roman Catholic parochial schools, virtually all run by the Catholic Diocese of Raleigh. The education offered to the largely, but not exclusively Catholic student body, about 20 percent of which is non-Catholic, may serve as an alternative model of education.

The Diocese of Raleigh takes in counties in central and eastern North Carolina, including the Triangle.

Most of the Roman Catholic schools in the Triangle provide education for students from kindergarten through the eighth-grade. In the K-8 field, Wake County has Cathedral Elementary, Franciscan Catholic School, Our Lady of Lourdes, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Mary Magdalene, St. Michael the Archangel, and St. Raphael. Orange County has St. Mary in Hillsborough and St. Thomas More in Chapel Hill. Durham County has Immaculata.

The Diocese of Raleigh has one high school: Cardinal Gibbons, which serves grades nine to 12. There is another Catholic high school in Raleigh, St. Thomas More Academy (not to be confused with St. Thomas More in Orange County). St. Thomas More Academy is not part of the diocesan school system, although it needs diocesan approval for its religious education program.

Dr. Michael Fedewa, superintendent of schools for the Raleigh Diocese, explains that until the last couple of decades, the Raleigh Diocese had only five schools, some of them founded when North Carolina was still considered mission territory: Our Lady of Lourdes, Cathedral School, Cardinal Gibbons, Orange County’s St. Thomas More, and Durham’s Immaculata. With the increase of the Roman Catholic population in recent years, additional schools have been built.

Making the grade

Like all private and parochial schools in North Carolina, the schools of the Raleigh Diocese are required by state law to administer “nationally standardized” tests to students in third, sixth and ninth grade. The diocese has chosen the Iowa Test of Basic Skills as the benchmark test through eighth grade, and administers the test for each grade. Students’ percentile rankings among other students nationwide taking the test are in the eighties. The schools’ percentile rankings among other schools nationwide taking the test are in the nineties.

Fedewa says the tests are given in the fall, so that teachers can see the results and diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of their students. Instruction does not center around the tests, Fedawa said: There is “no high-stakes testing.”

Tuition at the Catholic schools varies from $3,000 to $5,000 per year, Fedewa said. According to Immaculate Conception’s Web site, tuition in the K-8 program (and in a pre-kindergarten program) varies according to various factors — from $5,294 for families unaffiliated with a Roman Catholic parish, to $4,015 for families affiliated specifically with Immaculate Conception parish (families who enrolled multiple children before 1999 get tuition discounts, but large families whose children enroll later than 1999 no longer get discounts). Financial aid is sometimes offered for poor families.

The “greatest challenge” to the Catholic schools is finance, Fedewa said. In the past, the teaching staff was dominated by priests, monks, and nuns, who did not require extra pay for their teaching duties. Today, 98 percent of the teaching staff in the diocese are laypersons. The diocese pays the lay teachers a “just and competitive wage,” Fedewa said. These and other expenses of the schools are paid for by tuition, parish subsidies, and fund-raising.

Initiatives providing vouchers and tax credits for private-school education have been “wiped out” in the General Assembly, Fedewa said. Charter-school initiatives have “pushed aside” the voucher and tax-credit proposals, taking off some of the pressure for school choice.
If a voucher or tax-credit plan were to be enacted, Fedewa said, the diocesan schools would cooperate unless “we had to sacrifice our programming” to get the benefits of government aid. Government assistance would not be acceptable if it was conditioned on having the Catholic schools “alter what we do.” The purpose of Catholic education is to “focus on our Catholic faith” and “make the teachings of the church come to life,” he said.

Cardinal Gibbons is the only diocesan high school in the Triangle (St. Thomas More Academy in Cary being largely independent of the Raleigh Diocese). Cardinal Gibbons in many ways resembles a well-run public high school, rather than the stereotypical pre-Vatican II parochial school where tough priests and ruler-wielding nuns sternly enforce good behavior and correct doctrine on boys in suits and girls in full-length dresses.

Instead of this, all but six of the teachers are laypersons, and the dress code, while strict (no T-shirts, no jeans, no jackets unless they bear the school’s logo, girls must dress modestly, etc.), still allows students to wear street clothes, and full-length skirts or trousers are not required.

Not your average school

Despite these changes, many features of Cardinal Gibbons still distinguish it from a public high school. There are theology courses that students must take in order to graduate. There are crucifixes in the classrooms. There are morning Masses that students must attend, and there is a chapel for private devotions. The school is administered by the Franciscan Brothers of Brooklyn, and there’s a statue of St. Francis in the school theater (whose stage can double as an altar for Mass).

Jason Curtis, Cardinal Gibbons’ assistant principal for administration (and moderator of the student Surf Club), said the student body has grown considerably in the past 10 years from about 300 to 1,011. Curiously, the recent increase in the Triangle’s Hispanic population has not been fully reflected in the student body at Cardinal Gibbons and its feeder schools.

Cardinal Gibbons, Curtis said, is “[a] ble to accept a large number of the applicants,” although some folks have a false impression that it is difficult to enroll at the school. Alumni of the school have told Curtis that their education at Cardinal Gibbons prepared them for college, as well as supplying a “caring environment.”

Carolina Journal sat in on Cardinal Gibbons’ class on Holocaust literature, a required course in the English Department for juniors and seniors. The teacher, Michael Rogosich, is also in charge of student activities at Cardinal Gibbons.

Rogosich reads two short stories from a collection by Ida Fink entitled A Scrap of Time and Other Stories. Fink, who hid from the Nazis in Poland during the Holocaust, has fictionalized several stories about Jews’ Holocaust experiences.

After Rogosich reads each story, two students comment on it, and then the floor is open for a class discussion.

“Aryan Papers,” the first short story, is about a 16-year-old Jewish girl, who with her mother is posing as a Gentile in German-occupied Poland.

The girl goes to her boss’s apartment, where she trades her virginity and a sum of money in exchange for forged documents certifying her mother and herself as Aryans. Rogo-sich notes the difference in responses to this story between the male and female students.

The second short story, “Inspector Von Galoshinsky,” stars a Jew who has just been arrested and sent to a concentration camp. The other inmates play a joke on the new arrival. Von Galoshinsky, an inmate posing as a prison guard, interrogates and humiliates the newcomer. After some student discussion on the motivation for this harassment, Rogosich avers that it is a form of hazing, drawing a comparison with the way the juniors and seniors at Cardinal Gibbons haze the freshmen (though his comparison doesn’t imply that hazing at the school is as bad as the hazing in the short story).

CJ visited the media center (library), where teacher and administrator Ron Smith, a former Navy man, was supervising his sophomore theology students. The students’ assignment was to write a paper about an event in the New Testament (other than something that happened during Holy Week).

As librarian Catherine Spratley showed the students some reference books and instructed them on the use of an online database, Smith explained to CJ how students at Cardinal Gibbons learn how to write properly. Each student gets a notebook containing detailed instructions on the proper format for citations, as well as other information on how to prepare acceptable papers. Smith boasts that students want to keep these notebooks with them in college, because it prepares them well for doing acceptable college work.

Maximilian Longley is a contributing editor of Carolina Journal.