This past weekend I attended a Blue Knight Auction Platinum Event with a small group of Catholic school supporters interested in helping to continue our long tradition of providing tuition assistance. The event was wonderful and I want to thank all those who attended and contributed their time, talent and treasure to the effort. After the event I reflected on the question, “Where would LCSS be without tuition assistance?” I thought I would share some of those thoughts and my analysis with you.
First, it is difficult to imagine a Catholic school without tuition assistance. It is an essential component of our faith and imperative to our mission that we provide a Catholic education that meets the needs of our community. Further, our diocese and parishes provide us with the physical space and land to carry out this mission.
While this is true, we have to continue to ensure that LCSS provides an outstanding academic experience that is inspired and guided by our Catholic faith. I have been asked by some of our stakeholders “can we continue to afford our current level of tuition assistance and maintain a high quality of service?” or “don’t we need to use some of that money to improve technology or teacher pay?” I believe this perception represents a misunderstanding of how tuition assistance works and why it's important to all of our school families. The fact is that tuition assistance contributes significantly to all of our initiatives.
Without tuition assistance, fewer students would be able to attend our schools, and fixed costs would have to be spread across a smaller student population. This alone could cause tuition to rise between 20% and 30%, which would cause even further decreases in enrollment. In simple economic terms, “as the price goes up, demand typically goes down.”
Also, what is perhaps more interesting and perhaps not commonly known, is that nearly 100% of our students are receiving a form of tuition assistance. The current tuition charged is significantly below the actual cost to educate our students. A significant source of funds making up this difference is the nearly $1,200,000 provided annually by our six local parishes in the form of direct parish assistance and the expenses associated with the three elementary school building operations. If the LCSS did not have this additional revenue support from our supporting parishes to support our Catholic mission, tuition would again be higher and this again, could have a devastating impact on enrollment.
All forms of tuition assistance, both from our parishes and fundraising events such as the Blue Knight Auction, enable us to provide a more affordable Catholic education to our community. All forms of assistance go directly into our budget, enabling us to pay for: teacher compensation; technology in the classrooms; teacher training and support; athletics; transportation; and more. The bottom line is that we all benefit from a strong tuition assistance program. As a community, we will continue to push our academic standards and expectations even higher. Thank you for your continued support.
