Another One Bites the Dust

St. Mary's School in Meriden is closing:

The small classes that built big dreams at St. Mary's School will be a
thing of the past.The Catholic K-8 school on Grove Street will shut its doors
for good in June after 112 years.School Principal Robert J. Biancamano said the
closing is the result of financial pressure caused by declining enrollment. The
school has 83 students, down from more than 100 two years ago."The benchmark to
run a school like this is 200 kids," Biancamano said Tuesday. "It really did get
down to numbers."

There are deep, structural reasons why these tragic school closings keep happening: people migrating out of our cities (and out of Connecticut altogether), the decline of the religious orders that once staffed such schools with very little pay, the tendency of Catholics to put less time and money into our churches than our Protestant brethren put into theirs.

But the biggest reason of all is that our state government is owned lock, stock and barrel by the teachers unions. The U.S. Supreme Court has said that religious school choice programs do not violate the Constitution. And it is simple justice to allow citizens to spend their own tax dollars on the school of their choice. But the teachers unions will never allow it. And our Catholic schools--which do so much more with so much less than the public schools--will continue to close because of the increasing pressures they are under.

Gov. Rell and the legislature seem not to care. But the voters of a state that's 43% Catholic ought to.