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JANUARY 2025
Fostering Strong Catholic School Enrollment
It’s Catholic Schools Week, and for Catholic schools around the U.S., that means the launch of enrollment season! While this season is a time for much joy and celebration of the gift of Catholic education, this season can also be fraught with anticipation and worry for principals and pastors whose schools have struggled with declining enrollment, because declines are often a precursor to school closure. While Catholic schools—particularly those that serve historically underserved communities—face significant challenges that make boosting enrollment difficult, there remains much that school and parish leaders can do to attract and retain young families. Indeed, while the context within which a school operates can make the work easier or more challenging, in the end, enrollment gains or losses are not something that happens only to schools. They are something that happens because of a combination of community context, school policy, culture, and leadership.
The Path to Increased Enrollment Critical to leveraging the power and potential of Catholic education to rebuild thriving parish communities is finding ways to attract and retain young families. To that end, it can be easy to think of enrollment as a once-a-year event—a moment in time when schools need to ramp up marketing and outreach to try to find new families. Often, that work takes the form of seasonal marketing, re-enrollment incentives and discounts, and open houses. While these can be useful tools in the enrollment or re-enrollment toolkit, they actually play a very small part of a school’s effort to build (or rebuild) thriving school communities. In fact, for schools facing enrollment challenges, declines are often a symptom of a problem, not the problem itself. Just as a fever tells you that there is an infection or a virus that the body needs to fight off, declining enrollment tells leaders that there is something not working in the school community that will need to be addressed to help ensure enrollment increases endure. It stands to reason then to prioritize strategic solutions over temporary fixes to ensure sustainable growth.
Roundtable Resources: FOSTERING STRONG CATHOLIC SCHOOL ENROLLMENT
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