By Chaz Muth
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) — In the waning days of the Bush administration, the White House is sounding the alarm on a six-year loss of about 1,200 faith-based schools in the U.S. and has issued a report it believes will help stop the closures.

The report — “Preserving a Critical National Asset: America’s Disadvantaged Students and the Crisis in Faith-Based Urban Schools” — shows about half of the faith-based schools that have closed since 2002 have been Catholic institutions and most are located in poor urban neighborhoods.

“The president is very concerned and upset that these institutions are closing,” said Karl Zinsmeister, assistant to President George W. Bush and domestic policy adviser.

“Statistics show that students from poor urban neighborhoods who attend faith-based schools perform better academically than those who attend the public schools. We can’t afford to lose any more of these schools.”

Statistics show that minority students in U.S. urban Catholic high schools are 42 percent more likely to graduate than minority students who attend neighborhood public schools, and 2.5 times more likely to earn a college degree, Zinsmeister told Catholic News Service.

Released in September, the report is a product of last April’s White House Summit on Inner-City Children and Faith-Based Schools — which gathered educators, school lobbyists and business and government representatives to examine ways to reverse the trend of faith-based schools shutting down in U.S. cities.

The report proposes a multipronged approach to help inner-city faith-based schools continue to educate poor and minority students, from encouraging businesses to invest time, money and resources in the school systems, to partnering colleges with these institutions.

Zinsmeister said the report has not been forwarded to the U.S. presidential candidates — Democratic Sen. Barack Obama and Republican Sen. John McCain — but he hopes they will become aware of it and support the plan, which calls for a minimum of $300 million in federal spending.

The report recommends federal and state support in the form of scholarships and grants, and expansion of an experimental program in the District of Columbia that provides government funding to allow underprivileged students to attend faith-based and private schools.

The report also recommends the federal government establish a program called “Pell Grants for Kids,” which is similar to the Pell grants offered to needy college students to defray tuition expenses at the college of their choice.

“Pell Grants for Kids” would allow elementary and high school students to use similar grant money for the school of their choice.

“The Pell grant basically gives a college student a voucher to attend the college of their choice,” Zinsmeister said. “Now we want to see if we can’t do the same thing for poor kids to attend the private or parochial school of their choice.

The idea would be to pick out the worst of the worst schools in the country that have been failing and give students in those schools a Pell grant.”

There would be no church-state conflict, since the funding would be directed to the student and not the school, he said.

“There is a lot of room for businesses and universities to come forward to help struggling faith-based schools thrive again,” Zinsmeister said. “It’s a prime opportunity for American philanthropy, and encouraging business to come forward and support these schools.”

Not only can business people help with financial assistance, they can also teach school administrators how to manage their funds and create effective marketing programs, he said.

Universities also can partner with struggling schools, train teachers specifically for the faith-based institutions, help with fundraising, and offer professional development and curriculum support, Zinsmeister said.

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