The sisters who made the decision to close Ursuline High School committed Thursday night to share their facilities with Cardinal Newman High School to guarantee that all current Ursuline students can complete four years of Catholic education.
But they also said the decision to close the school was final and they would not pursue efforts at fundraising.
The announcements at an evening meeting with parents, students and administrators - the second in as many days - was the first opportunity to hear directly from the three-woman board of directors who announced Tuesday that they would close the 130-year-old girls school at the end of the school year because of declining enrollment and financial troubles.
Since the announcement, students, parents and alumni have openly questioned why they were kept in the dark and why they weren't asked to help find a solution.
Can the school be saved if enough private money is raised – enough to cover this year, next year and to fund a multi-million dollar endowment to keep the school operating?
The sisters had an answer: No.
"The decision to close the school was not made hastily, and it was with a lot of prayer and with a lot of consideration of all our options," Sister Joanne Abrams, the president of the Ursuline board of directors, told the crowd.
"Unfortunately, (because of) the seriousness of the school's financial situation, which is the result of many years of deficits and a persistent struggling economy, we could no longer afford to keep the school open, despite contributions of more than a million dollars of our own funds," she said.
Abrams and the other two nuns who make up the board, Sister Christine van Swearingen and Sister Dianne Baumunk, were asked many times from the crowd of 250 in the school gym why they didn't issue an urgent plea for donations and whether they would reconsider the closure if funds could be raised now.
Sister van Swearingen, vice president of the board, said their decision was final – a response met with grumbles and a few cries of frustration.
At one point in the meeting, students began filing quietly down from the bleachers and into the center of the basketball court, directly facing the sisters. For the girls, more than three dozen of them, it was a quiet demonstration to highlight their dissatisfaction with what they were hearing.
"Everyone kept asking, &‘Why not, why didn't you ask us for help?'" said sophomore class president Allyson Ahlstrom, following the meeting. "They eventually answered us, but it wasn't what we wanted to hear. I'm very disappointed," she said.
Tuesday's surprise email announcement of the school closure caught faculty, staff, students and parents off guard, and surprised many with a parallel announcement that the sisters plan to open a public charter school on the grounds in the future to focus their efforts on helping poor, disadvantaged students.
The plan for a charter school was questioned Thursday. They night before, more than 200 parents attended a similar school meeting seeking answers. Many, though, left unsatisfied because Principal Julie Carver couldn't answer many of their questions, saying the big-picture questions could only be answered by the sisters.
The nuns' absence Wednesday offended some and sparked suspicion of what the order's true intentions for the school and property are. That feeling persisted and prompted another try Thursday, this time with the decision makers answering the questions.
"It does seem like it's very easy for you to make this decision, contrary to what you said," said Ron Forsell, whose daughter is a junior. "You have this other mission in mind and while that's noble ... those students already have another school to go to, a public school," he said.
He said the sisters have a mandate to preach Catholicism, which they cannot legally do at a public school.
"You are abandoning that," Forsell said, to applause from the other parents.
"We're not trying to abandon anything," Sister van Swearingen responded. "We are trying to broaden it. We cannot continue to do this. It is not feasible."
Administrators at the adjacent Cardinal Newman boys high school have offered to accept current Ursuline girls and pledged to uphold Ursuline's traditions as the girls finish their education at Newman.
Cardinal Newman principal Graham Rutherford, in attendance Thursday, promised "to keep the best parts of both schools."
"Ursuline is not going to disappear under a Newman cloud," he said.
Ursuline administrators said they realized in September that the school was in dire financial straits, with not enough money in the bank to even finish this academic year. The sisters, who had lent the school money before, committed $1.2 million of their own funds to the school.
But they said a decade of declining enrollment and the overall financial picture were unsustainable and decided to close the school after this year.
The high school was founded in 1880 by the Ursuline Sisters, an international Catholic order with roots that go back to Italy in the sixteenth century. The Ursuline Sisters of the Western Province have an office at the Angela Center on Angela Drive, on a hill at the rear of the school.
The Western Province council approved the recommendation to close the school, Abrams said.
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