🔒Fitchburg business leaders have come together to save St. Bernard’s school

Fitchburg had seen the decline in Catholic church attendance exact a toll on city neighborhoods.

All at once in 2010, four churches in the city closed, leaving behind blighted buildings at what were once cornerstones of their communities.

Business leaders and the city’s mayor didn’t want to see the same happen to St. Bernard’s Central Catholic High School.

A group made up largely of alumni has come together to ensure the school will stay open, even as it will no longer receive financial support from its longtime formal tie with the Roman Catholic Diocese of Worcester.

“We weren’t looking to support the school just to keep it on life support,” said alumnus Nick Pelletier, a real estate agent for Pelletier Properties, a Keller Williams realty office, and the treasurer of the Bernardian Foundation, a newly formed group aimed at supporting the school.

Pelletier is one of a group largely made up of local businesspeople who joined to ensure the school wouldn’t become another vacant space in the city.

Another is Fitchburg Mayor Stephen DiNatale, a St. Bernard’s graduate himself. DiNatale sees keeping the school, which sits a one-minute drive south of downtown, as vital to an effort to draw more families and growth to the city.

“Education is part of economic development,” DiNatale said.

Demographic struggles

St. Bernard’s, which turns a century old this year, has been struggling for years with declining enrollment.

The school has a capacity for 800 students, but its student body numbered 134 in the 2018-’19 school year, according to the Massachusetts Department of Education.

That’s a drop of three-quarters from 2002, the year when enrollment was 532.

St. Bernard’s hasn’t been alone.

The Fitchburg school and three others affiliated with the Diocese of Worcester – the middle and high schools Holy Name and St. Peter-Marian, and St. Peter Central Catholic Elementary School in Worcester – have had a 13% drop in enrollment in the past five years.

Enrollment at Holy Name and St. Peter-Marian, which will merge next school year, fell by more than half in the past 15 years, a drop the diocese said would be worse if not for a reliance on international students.

Those two schools, along with St. Bernard’s and St. Peter Central Catholic, were helped with more than $450,000 in church subsidies in 2018, according to diocese financial reports.

Already, St. Bernard’s has brought in a larger percentage of non-Catholic students.

The school, which includes a daily theology class in its curriculum and a monthly religious service, is 75% Catholic today, a ratio the foundation expects to move closer to 50/50 in the coming years.

Needing to be self-sufficient

The diocese, the branch of the Catholic Church that oversees the region, told St. Bernard’s last year it could no longer financially support the school. The diocese ran a deficit of around $1.4 million in fiscal 2019, the second straight year it failed to break even.

That sparked fears about long-running rumors of St. Bernard’s closing possibly coming true.

“The rumors have been around for so long they became self-fulfilling,” said Linda Anderson, who is in her first year as St. Bernard’s principal after almost a decade as a teacher there.

Bishop Robert McManus, the top official in the diocese, approved a split with the school following what the church called a fiscally responsible business plan for St. Bernard’s to allow it to be financially independent.

As a standalone private school, St. Bernard’s will no longer have the diocese for financial help.

But school boosters are confident they’ll have enough backing of their own.

The Bernardian Foundation’s fundraising drive kicked off last fall and within 24 hours got a six-figure anonymous donation.

The drive surpassed $1 million within four months, and supporters hope to reach $2 million within five years.

“The easy part comes first,” said Greg Moran, a commercial real estate consultant for Aubuchon Hardware in Westminster. “After the first $1 million, the hard work starts.”

Finding future success

Becoming an independent school requires setting up a new nonprofit entity as well as dropping “Central Catholic” from St. Bernard’s formal name.

The Central Catholic part of the school's name, if often left out when mentioning St. Bernard's, was a formality signifying the former tie with the diocese.

St. Bernard’s will lease its Harvard Street property from the diocese for $1 a year.

Enrollment doesn’t need to return to its level from a generation ago in order to make the school solvent, its leaders say.

Those working to save the school have looked for ideas to, among others, Montachusett Regional Vocational Technical School in Fitchburg.

The enrollment at Montachusett Regional of roughly 1,400 students is up one-fourth in the past two decades.

St. Bernard’s plans to begin offering various tracks of study – in business, engineering and health sciences next year, and eventually in psychology, computer science and others – like something a student would expect to find at a vocational school, along with junior-year internships.

Still, St. Bernard’s – which draws from across Northern Worcester County and into New Hampshire – isn’t moving away from its Catholic identity and the values coming with an affiliation with a religious institution.

“It’s not that we need to change,” Moran said, calling it a matter of better selling the school’s strengths to potential students. “Communicate is the effective word.”