St. Anthony School students gather at the Kalihi parish church Sept. 5 for Friday morning Mass. Students dressed in aloha attire and brought canned good donations from each grade level to the altar during the liturgy. (HCH photo | Darlene Dela Cruz)
Hawaii Catholic School enrollment from 2004 to 2014
Good news on the Hawaii Catholic school front: for the first time in eight years, enrollment has gone up, not down.
The net total increase of 65 students for all 38 preschools, elementary and high schools is seemingly modest — an average of fewer than two per school. But it’s actually quite significant, considering that, for the previous seven years, the school system lost an average of 330 students a year.
According to figures provided by the Hawaii Catholic Schools office dated Sept. 3, the total enrollment for the start of the 2014 school year was 9,179. Nineteen schools gained a total of 361 students over the previous year, while 15 schools lost 296 students and four schools remained the same.
School superintendent Michael Rockers said one possible explanation for the unexpected reversal could be found in the change in the state law which now requires children who turn five after July 31 to wait another year before attending kindergarten.
“The increase seems to be due in part to larger enrollment in our pre-kindergarten and early learning centers,” he said.
He said that Catholic preschool students whose fifth birthdays fall after July 31, who in the past might have left for public school kindergarten, may be staying another year. But he said the grade-by-grade enrollment figures that might confirm that haven’t been tallied yet.
The state public school system this year opened only 21 pre-kindergarten classrooms in 18 elementary schools to cover the late-born students.
This year’s big enrollment winner was Kauai whose two Catholic schools, one on the east side, one on the west, each made noteworthy gains. St. Catherine School in Kapaa grew by 40 students from 161 to 201, a 25 percent increase. St. Theresa, Kekaha, added 23 students, going from 73 to 96, a 32 percent increase. Both have preschools.
“We are seeing an upswing,” said St. Catherine principal Celina Haigh. “Our community is growing. Kapaa is growing.”
“We did anticipate growth,” Haigh told the Hawaii Catholic Herald by phone last week. “We ar
e working really hard to improve our program.”
The school has hired a curriculum coordinator and doubled its kindergarten classes. Haigh said the larger kindergarten class was partially the result of the new public school kindergarten age restriction, but that St. Catherine has seen growth in other grades also.
“We also have a full first grade and a nearly full second grade,” she said.
“Through the recession we were very blessed,” she said. Except for one year, “we had been seeing a steady increase.” Last year the school added 18 additional students.
The principal said she does not remember a time when the school had more than 200 students.
“We are actually running out of space,” Haigh said, “which is a good problem to have. But we have a lot of parents who are very supportive.”
Convenience and location
Damien Memorial, the formerly all-boys school that went co-ed in 2012, has seen some impressive growth over the past two years, going from 473 in 2012, to 597 in 2013, to 662 in 2014.
Damien Memorial president Bernard Ho believes a number of factors have contributed to the enrollment increase, which this year is nearly 120 students more than the 545 the school had initially projected.
Accepting girls not only doubles the pool of eligible students but it allows families to send siblings to a single school, a big convenience for parents, he said.
“We are about 30 percent female, from sixth grade to grade 11,” he said. The first graduating co-ed class will be in 2016.
“People are also attracted to our location,” the school president said. Damien is the only one of five Oahu Catholic high schools located in West Honolulu, an advantage for downtown workers commuting from west and central Oahu, he said.
Ho said that Damien is also “close to military bases” and “we are starting to see a trend in military families, many of whom are practicing Catholics, sending their children here.”
Ho said that Damien is trying to attract and keep students with more extracurricular and cultural programs including a halau, more clubs, more foreign languages, and model rocketry.
He said the school’s present capital campaign “fits into our strategic plan to improve programs and facilities.”
He also said that parent and student satisfaction has been “great for us” in promoting the school through word of mouth.
As for why more Catholic schools in general are seeing an enrollment upturn, Ho suggested it might reflect a “growing disenchantment” with the public school system.
“Or we may be doing a better job branding and marketing what we offer,” he said.
Whatever the reason, he is not going to overplay his confidence. “The economy could switch on us,” he said. “You never know.”
Other schools with noteworthy increases were St. John the Baptist, Kalihi, up 29; Star of the Sea Early Learning Center, up 33; Saint Louis, up 21; and Sacred Hearts School, Lahaina, up 27.
Pressing the personal touch
According to its enrollment director Linda Jenkins, Sacred Hearts School’s success is the result of a lot of hard work concentrated mostly in increased communication, a personal touch with inquiring families and a timely follow-through with anyone showing an interest in the school.
It also involved overhauling the school’s website, its registration process, its open houses and more.
“We’ve been busy,” she said.
Jenkins said that a strategic plan for the school emerged a couple of years ago from a “think tank composed of people in different walks of life” who decided the school needed to look ahead to the year 2025.
Not only was there the need “stay in business,” but to “look to the future,” she told the Hawaii Catholic Herald by phone last week.
Jenkins’ unpaid position of enrollment director emerged from the planning. Being a former international marketing and advertising specialist, it was a good fit.
“We worked at getting the word out” about the school, she said. “We recreated the website from scratch, wrote regularly for the local papers, and repeated the message over and over” that the school’s purpose was to educate its students as “followers of Jesus.”
Jenkins said the school also highlighted student success stories and showcased alumni.
She said the school “restructured the whole enrollment process” offering discounts for those who registered early, always following them up with phone calls.
The school’s open house was reconfigured to target new and potential families rather than existing ones.
Overall, “it’s very much a personal touch that makes the difference,” she said, “the phone call, the immediate response.”
“Much of this is just basic common sense,” she said, “though we also did a lot of research.”
Dominican Sister of the Holy Rosary Cecilia Fabular, principal of St. John the Baptist, attributed her school’s growing enrollment to “the active participation of the school board, the marketing committee, the PTG board, parent ambassadors, alumni and our development office.”
But she said the greatest factor was word of mouth — the “most powerful message” of parents, students, faculty and staff telling their “personal story or experience” of the school “ohana.”
“We treat each other as members of our family, our tuition is affordable, we provide a safe and caring environment to all our students, and we prayed a lot for the increase of our enrollment, not for our school but also for all our Catholic schools,” Sister Cecilia wrote in an email to the Hawaii Catholic Herald.
She also credited their “vibrant and energetic pastor,” Father John Fredy Quintero.
As a creative way to keep tuition affordable, the school also produced a play to raise money for tuition assistance, she said.
Statewide, even with the overall turnaround, this year’s enrollment is still 163 fewer than 2012’s total of 9,342, making 2014 the second smallest enrollment year, after 2013, since 1945.
The highest Hawaii Catholic school enrollment on record was 17,150 in 1965-66. The numbers declined to the 14,000-level in the 1970s, rose again to 15,298 in 1980, and has been dropping steadily ever since.
Enrollment figures from Hawaii Catholic Schools office.
