The rumors were already circulating at All Hallows High School in the South Bronx when Mona Agbeko, a junior, opened the dreaded email.
Her mother had picked her up at school that day and they were almost at their home in the Bronx when Mona read aloud the news that hit like a recurring nightmare. Her school was closing down. Again.
Less than a year earlier, Mona and her friend Bridget Mulligan were sophomores at St. Barnabas, a Catholic girls’ school in the Bronx. When the school abruptly informed them that it was closing after 100 years, All Hallows, a boys’ school, broke 115 years of tradition and made room for the girls of St. Barnabas.
But in late January, just as the girls’ second term was about to end, the pitiless ax fell once more. All Hallows, which opened in 1909 with a mission to educate the poor, announced that it will close in June, another inner-city Catholic school fallen victim to financial distress.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Mona said. “Again? We’re not even six months into the school year. I’m baffled.”
Catholic school contraction has been a decades-long epidemic, but for the St. Barnabas girls, this seemed particularly cruel. For the second time in eight months, Bridget and Mona learned their school would shutter.
“I’m paralyzed with anxiety,” Deirdre Mulligan, Bridget’s mother, said at her home in the Throgs Neck section of the Bronx. “I don’t know what to do.”
Across the country, and especially in low-income areas, where Catholic institutions have long offered an alternative to overstretched public schools, their decline has been pronounced. In 1959, more than five million students were enrolled in Catholic schools nationwide; now the figure is about 1.6 million, according to data from the Cardinal Newman Society, a nonprofit that advocates Catholic education.
New York has been hit hard. At the end of the 2021-22 school year, for example, the Archdiocese of New York reported 12 closings or mergers of Catholic schools. Last month it announced seven. Shortly after the All Hallows announcement, Preston High School, the all-girls alma mater of Jennifer Lopez, announced it would close after 75 years in the Bronx.
A number of problems contribute to the closure of urban Catholic schools, but in the end it is usually about declining enrollment and a lack of money. Gerald Cattaro, the executive director of the Center for Catholic School Leadership and Faith-Based Education at Fordham University, cites a combination of factors: the proliferation of charter schools, the diminishing ranks of religious staff who once served as the backbone of the Catholic school system and financial hardship within the communities that the schools serve.
Professor Cattaro worked at three Catholic schools in New York over 21 years. All have closed.
“It’s no longer a shock when you hear about a school closing,” he said. “In a lot of cases, it’s more of an expectation.”
For close to a century, All Hallows has stood proudly on 164th Street near the Grand Concourse, just a couple of blocks from Yankee Stadium. The Congregation of Christian Brothers, an order founded by the 19th-century Irish missionary Edmund Ignatius Rice, opened the school to educate indigent boys, most of them Irish immigrants. The school has been housed in the same red brick building since 1929, when All Hallows moved to the Bronx from its original location in Harlem.
The neighborhood changed, but the mission did not. Today the All Hallows student body is almost entirely made up of children of color who come from families of modest means (57 percent receive some form of public assistance). Most live in the Bronx and Upper Manhattan neighborhoods surrounding the school.
Bridget’s mother is a nurse who works the overnight shift at Calvary hospital in the Bronx. She went to St. Barnabas as a girl and was originally delighted when Bridget went there too. But its closure without warning caused resentment.
Then Bridget heard about All Hallows, which agreed to accept her St. Barnabas scholarship. Five St. Barnabas students, including Bridget and Mona, joined about 17 other girls at All Hallows last September as they anxiously prepared to become the first girls to attend the school.
“I was a little overwhelmed,” Mona said. “There were way more boys than girls, and that’s intimidating.”
Right away, several boys introduced themselves, including Daniel Pimentel, a fellow junior, who gave the girls directions and advice. A few others invited the girls to sit at their lunch table. From that point, Mona and Bridget were happily ensconced in their new school.
“I loved it from the first day,” Bridget said.
All Hallows seemed to almost enchant Bridget. Though she had never done any public speaking before, she thrived as a school ambassador, giving presentations to elementary schools nearby about the value of an All Hallows education — at least until the recent news broke.
Tuition at All Hallows is capped at $7,500, but it costs the school $11,000 per student, administrators said, and many families receive financial aid. According to the Christian Brothers, the decision to close was agonizing, especially because All Hallows was the order’s first school in the United States. The congregation, which runs several other schools in the New York City area, also closed Rice High School, in Harlem, in 2011.
Sensing the threat of imminent closure, All Hallows amped up a campaign in January to raise $2.5 million within a few weeks. It fell about $400,000 short, but many parents, alumni and staff members believe the Christian Brothers had already made their decision. Donald O’Toole, a 1969 graduate who taught there for four years and was the chairman of the board for six years starting in 2000, is one of them.
“This congregation has abandoned Harlem and now the South Bronx,” he said. “They have lost their way.”
The board of trustees, made up of Christian Brothers, said the decision was unavoidable and cited a multimillion-dollar budget deficit, declining long-term enrollment, the increasing cost of education and a century-old building in need of fundamental upgrades.
“We, too, are grieving this sad end to the Edmund Rice Catholic education that has shaped thousands of lives in an underserved community,” the board said in a written statement.
The building is in need of renovations, but the hallways and classrooms are bright and clean. In one corner sits a small, elegant chapel with dark wood paneling, Irish stained glass and a bone relic from Edmund Rice himself.
The debate over the decision to close was emotional, but none disputed All Hallows’ role in the lives of thousands of college-bound students. Last year, the school says, 100 percent of the graduating seniors were accepted to four-year colleges.
“This school is a beacon of hope,” said Orlando Brenes, the director of admissions. “To take it all away is heartbreaking. It’s a travesty.”
Mr. Brenes and his brothers — like him, All Hallows alums — worked as janitors in the mornings before school to help defray costs. After graduating, he taught there for 18 years before becoming admissions director. For Mr. Brenes, the worst moment after the closure was when a group from a charter school toured the building unannounced and took measurements. “The body isn’t even cold,” he said.
There are currently 325 students at All Hallows. Since it opened up to girls, applications soared to 400 this year, from 243 last year. The girls added new energy and introduced new customs, like decorating the lockers of fellow students on their birthdays.
Daniel Pimentel, the 11th grader who welcomed Bridget and Mona, loved the new vibe the girls brought, which made the announcement of closure even harder to bear. That night, he said, he sat nearly motionless in his family’s Bronx apartment and could not even bring himself to attend school the next day.
“The girls found a home,” he said, “and now it’s happened again.”
The mood now is subdued, Mona said, and some students have already transferred. For those who can afford it, Catholic school is still the hope, provided they can find one that will accept their All Hallows scholarships. About half are expected to switch to public school.
Mona, who wants to attend Columbia University and eventually become a neurosurgeon, was recently accepted at Cathedral, a Catholic school for girls in Manhattan. She is relieved, but is sad to leave All Hallows and her new friends.
Bridget, who wants to pursue criminal justice, is headed to a public high school. But she was told she won’t know which one until August.
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