Holy Trinity Elementary School

My School is closing!
Hackensack Catholic school to close
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
BY JOHN CHADWICK
STAFF WRITERS
A Catholic elementary school in Hackensack will close in June because of declining enrollment, the Newark Archdiocese said today.
Holy Trinity School, on Maple Avenue, has experienced about a 24 percent decline in students since 2000 and currently has an enrollment of 183, said Jim Goodness, a spokesman for the archdiocese.
Church officials plan to merge Holy Trinity with St. Francis School, a parish school on South Main Street that also has suffered enrollment loss and is down to about 118 students.
The archdiocese decided that St. Francis School would be the one to stay open because it has received extensive renovations in recent years. The school is under a flight path for Teterboro Airport and received government grants for soundproofing, Goodness said.
«To try and level off the costs of providing education and stabilizing enrollment, which has fallen at both schools, the natural solution is that the parishes should combine their schools into one,» Goodness said, adding that such issues as transportation and staffing were still being worked out.
Holy Trinity is the sixth parish school that the archdiocese plans to close this year and the only one in Bergen County. The other schools are in Hudson, Essex and Union counties.
Goodness said that schools with declining enrollments typically turn to the parish for financial assistance. But with parishes also struggling with changing demographics and increased costs, their ability to support schools is limited.
«It is reaching the point in some parishes where they cannot support the school in the way they might have in the past,» Goodness said.
The pastor at Holy Trinity said the parish was contributing about $ 150,000 to $ 200,000 to the school, but the enrollment was still falling. The tuition is about $ 3,200 a year for parish families.
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How could I *not* give my Elementary school five stars? (Especially if it’s Religious!)
No, seriously. All kidding aside, this was a Catholic K-​8 school, complete with boys and girls in plaid uniforms, nuns in habits, and daily assembly outside in the parking lot (YES, even in the SNOW) to ‘line up’ and take attendance.
Though I was never baptised and never raised Catholic, I thought this was a great place. The teachers and sisters at this place ran a TIGHT ship. You wouldn’t ever THINK of smack talking, much less bring stuff to school that didn’t belong. The fear of the cruxifix at the front of each classroom was enough to set you straight, regardless of your religion.
Looking back, for a faculty of ALL women, these ladies knew what they were doing– they did NOT take crap from us kids! AND, I even learned a few things, science and math, and they even had art and music class. Gym in those uniforms was pretty uncomfortable, though
I was only there from 3^rd through 5^th grade … and THEN I went to public school in Southern California! Oh, the horror!