An entrance is shown at Saint Christopher Catholic School in North Las Vegas Monday, June 13, 2022.
Published Friday, June 17, 2022 | 2 a.m.
Updated Friday, June 17, 2022 | 2 a.m.
Parochial education in Las Vegas is going through a transition.
Most recently, that includes the closure of St. Christopher Catholic School, the Diocese of Las Vegas’ only North Las Vegas campus. That leaves the diocese, which has parishes in five counties but schools just in the Las Vegas Valley, with only seven remaining schools — all of them small by local public school standards.
In a February letter to St. Christopher parishioners and families, Bishop George Leo Thomas and Auxiliary Bishop Gregory Gordon said the diocese decided to close the school after 12 years of financial struggles and dwindling enrollment.
The parish and diocese had directed $5.1 million since 2010 to keep the school afloat, the bishops wrote.
“The diocese has worked relentlessly to pursue any and all viable options to keep the school open,” the bishops wrote. “The ongoing fiscal realities, as well as the COVID pandemic, have taken a toll, making this an unsustainable situation, one that is impossible to continue.”
Cathy Thompson, the diocesan superintendent of schools, said parishes can supplement their schools, but tuition is meant to be the main revenue stream for each site. Tuition at St. Christopher, in an older, working-class part of North Las Vegas, was $5,250 a year. And only 146 students, in kindergarten through eighth grade, were enrolled last year.
She said the school had 247 pupils as recently as 2016, when the Nevada Opportunity Scholarship — a state tax credit program that allows donors to help lower-income students offset private school tuition — was new. The Legislature has since restricted the program, which the bishops cited as one of the blows to St. Christopher School’s survival.
The diocese last closed a school in 2013 when it shuttered St. Joseph School in downtown Las Vegas, also for low enrollment and finances.
Yet the diocese has reasons to be hopeful for the future of Catholic education in Southern Nevada. Thompson said overall enrollment climbed by 7% in 2020-21. She attributed this growth to the Catholic schools being able to consistently offer working parents who couldn’t work from home in-person schooling for their children; the vast majority of public schools were online-only because of the pandemic that year but her schools had re-opened with physical distancing and cleaning protocols. Even if they enrolled for convenience reasons, the new families seem to have stuck with it, including the non-Catholics, she said.
Diocesan schools now enroll about 3,350 kids systemwide. About 250 are at St. Anthony of Padua, which opened two years ago to fill an unmet demand in Henderson. Until St. Anthony opened, Henderson was the largest city in the country without a Catholic school, Thompson said. And Cristo Rey St. Viator, which follows the Catholic tradition with a college prep, work study model but is not under the diocesan umbrella, is set to graduate its first seniors next year.
St. Christopher Principal Rick Blanc said about three-quarters of his displaced or graduated students from last year will stay in local Catholic schools, as will more than half of the small, lay staff (Blanc will take the helm at St. Anthony in the fall). Thirteen eighth-graders were promoted, and most will go to Bishop Gorman and Cristo Rey for ninth grade. A couple will join magnet programs at Clark County School District high schools.
St. Christopher opened in 1964. At that time, the neighborhood that is now solidly mid-metro at Lake Mead Boulevard and Bruce Street was near the developing edge of Vegas.
The classrooms are now all emptied out except for one seventh-grade room, which still has rows of desks, a small portrait of Pope John Paul II and a few stacks of U.S. history books and Bibles to pack away. The diocese will maintain the school building for faith formation and adult programming.
On June 2, Bishop Gordon stopped by St. Christopher to give the children a special year-end blessing. Parents lingered on the playground blacktop longer than usual afterward, Blanc said.
Thompson said families make sacrifices to give their children a Catholic education, and they were saddened that their years of optimism that the little school would keep holding on had to end.
“They aren’t just names and numbers, these are people that you know,” she said.
