Higher enrollment is needed for Manoa school to remain open

After 94 years of educating Hawaii’s youth, Saint Francis School will close its middle and high schools at the end of the academic year in May, its board announced Monday, citing loss of financial assistance.

The Catholic school in Manoa will continue to operate its preschool-through-sixth-grade program, enrollment permitting, Randall Yee, chairman of the school’s board of directors, said.

“If enrollment targets are not met and we are forced to permanently cease operations for all grade levels, an announcement will be made by March 31, 2019,” he wrote Monday in a letter to Friends of Saint Francis School.

The bulk of the enrollment is in the middle and high schools with 315 of the total 447 students. There are 132 in the preschool and lower levels.

“The Sisters of Saint Francis of the Neumann Communities have been very generous over the years in financially assisting the school, but can no longer afford to do so after this year,” Yee said.

He expressed the school’s “deep gratitude to the Sisters and the entire Saint Francis School ohana for their support and commitment throughout the years.”

Saint Francis’ tuition for high school is the third lowest in the state at $13,000 a year, after Kamehameha and Hanalani schools. Tuition is $11,200 for grades 7 and 8, a news release from the school said.

“The mission of the school had always been to cater to the underserved and underprivileged,” Yee said. “Not only did Saint Francis’ annual tuition fall well below other private schools, but over 60 percent were on some type of private assistance.”

Parents were reeling from the news Monday, having to find another school for their children when other private schools may have already begun their testing and application process.

Renee Tulonthari and her husband, parents of a sophomore, said they just read the email from the school Monday afternoon. “Our daughter is in there from kindergarten, and she’s now a sophomore. We’re pretty bummed, and I just finished her scholarship papers. Now I got to find another school.”

Their daughter has always had a scholarship from Kamehameha Schools that could be used for any private school, and part of the reason they chose Saint Francis was that if they ever lost the financial aid, they could probably pay Saint Francis’ relatively low tuition.

They chose Saint Francis because “we like the small class setting, the focus on academics, and they care about the student as a person as opposed to just another number,” she said. “She made good friends — a lot of them. There’s probably a handful of them left from kindergarten. … She played sports. She planned on graduating from there.”

No nuns currently teach or serve in any capacity at the school, which he acknowledged may be a component of the financial difficulties.

The lack of nuns teaching is, in part, due to “very few individuals becoming nuns,” Yee said.

In June the beloved Sister Joan of Arc Souza, then head of school for 27 years and the last of the nuns working there, was ousted. An official from the Sisters of Saint Francis of the Neumann Communities, based in Syracuse, N.Y., urged her to retire. She declined and was removed from her position by June 14.

“A change in direction was needed in order for the school to continue,” Yee said. “I’m certainly not downplaying all of Sister Joan of Arc’s contributions over the years. Everything she did was for the students and for the school.”

But changing demographics, lower enrollment and the need to re-identify the school to meet current needs was behind the change in leadership, he said.

“It was not a plan to eliminate the upper grades,” Yee said. “The board’s hope was that we could provide enough time to Casey (Asato, new head of school) to reshape Saint Francis. The economics and the reality of where we were didn’t give us that time.”

Yee said Souza’s focus on sports was to provide a well-rounded curriculum, getting students to participate, and many student athletes did well, though it may have come with “a little bit of sacrifice of the educational component of our students.”

The 27 or so nuns living at the convent at Saint Francis are on average in their mid- to late 70s and continue to strongly support athletic events, school functions, recitals and plays, said Asato. They will continue to live on campus until a care facility in Liliha is ready.

The nuns are due to move to an assisted-care facility in Liliha, said Pat Bigold, spokesman for the school.

Yee said in his letter that the decision to close grades 7 to 12 was difficult, and asked the community for help with monetary contributions, enrolling their children at the school and encouraging others to do so, and volunteering.

The school’s board members remain optimistic are looking at several options, school operations, budgeting, maximizing use of the campus and hoping for community support, Yee said.

He said the board is open, in the long term, to bring back grades 7 to 12, but its main focus is a high-quality elementary school.

Kelly (Holland) Dreyfuss, a 1990 Saint Francis graduate and class president, said she saw the news on Facebook at her home in Yorktown, Va.

“My stomach just dropped,” she said. “I received a text message with a handful of my closest friends from Saint Francis. We’ve been talking about it for the last 20 minutes. There’s just this feeling of emptiness.”

Dreyfuss attended when it was an all-girls school and nuns did most of the teaching.

“It was such a special time for us,” she said. “We still value the Franciscan education we received. … It allowed us to truly be ourselves. We were able to receive an outstanding education without the distractions that a coed education had.”

She recalls her eighth-grade science teacher, Sister Agnes Hino, who was “pretty hard on me back then. But she was the one sister that seemed to encourage me the most.”

Dreyfuss now works for NASA as a cybersecurity subject matter expert at the Langley Research Center.

A few facts about Saint Francis School

>> Founded as a Catholic girls high school in 1924

>> Added lower grades in early 1990s

>> Began admitting boys in 2006

>> Campus consists of 11 acres in Manoa Valley

>> Total enrollment is 447, including 315 students in grades 7-12

>> Faculty and staff totals 68

>> Student teacher ratio is 7-to-1