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E-Mail CERExcerpts from "Many Cleveland Parents Frantic After Ruling Limits School Vouchers," New York Times, August 26, 1999
"Maria Silaghi did not sleep Wednesday night. She scrubbed other people's floors until after midnight. And then she lay in bed and agonized over whether her 10-year-old son, Anthony, might have to leave his Roman Catholic grammar school.
"'Please don't take this away from us,' said Ms. Silaghi, a 34-year-old house cleaner, as she sat near a statue of the Blessed Virgin in the halls of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, seemingly a world away from her West Side neighborhood, where children grow up learning the street-gang swagger. 'My son needs this.'
"But many parents in the voucher programs say it is the academic strength, along with rigorous discipline, that makes these schools so desirable. Of the 70 students on vouchers at Our Lady of Mount Carmel, about half are not Catholic. Many poor and working-class people in the city say these parochial schools offer their children the best shot at keeping up with their counterparts in good suburban schools, not to mention the elite private schools.
"'I can't afford to move to the suburbs,' said Ms. Silaghi, who beamed proudly as her son, Anthony, came out of school and greeted some adults with courtesy and poise. 'If you send your children to the public schools in the city, you're taking a big risk. I won't do that.' She took a breath and fought back tears, then added, 'I'll work 10 jobs before I send him to the public schools.'
"Sister Rosario Vega, the principal at Our Lady of Mount Carmel, said she had spent the last day fielding telephone calls from frantic parents, worried that their children would have to leave school because they could not afford the $800-a-year tuition.
"'I'm telling them, 'Calm down, we'll work through this together,' said Sister Rosario. Outside the 50-year-old red-brick school, trimmed with marigolds and petunias, some worried parents embraced and tried to shore up one another.
"There has been little debate that some religious schools in urban neighborhoods, especially Catholic schools, have demonstrated great success with poor children. A nationwide study of 1,500 schools by the University of Chicago in 1989 found that religious schools had a lower dropout rate than both public schools and nonreligious private schools. The author of the study, the late Prof. James Coleman, said many poor urban children thrived in religious schools, with their emphasis on structure, discipline and an ethos of caring for one another. Catholic schools in America, some scholars have noted, were organized for a largely working-class, immigrant student body, not terribly different from the students in big cities today.
"The timing of the judge's ruling, on the day before classes started in Cleveland's public schools, came in for much criticism here. The Cleveland Plain Dealer, in an editorial titled 'Voucher vulture,' complained that the last-minute ruling threw families and schools into needless fear and confusion. The newspaper called it 'an act of arrogance, carelessness and utter disregard for the needs of children across the city.'
"Jennifer Spurgeon, who has three children who receive aid to attend Our Lady of Mount Carmel, said she could not fathom turning to the public schools.
"When she heard about the judge's ruling, she said, she grew angry. 'This can't be true, it just can't be,' she recalled saying, over and over. 'I thought, 'We've got to make some decisions and we've got to make them this minute. 'It was like somebody stabbed me in the heart.'
"Mrs. Spurgeon was just about to start attending a vocational college for automotive technology. She has canceled her enrollment, however, because she does not know whether the family might need money right away.
"When her husband, Daniel, a delivery truck driver, walked in the door, she told him they might have to take the children out of their school. He told her, 'I'll work two jobs.' "