Low enrollment and financial struggles will bring the end for another Catholic school in Brooklyn this summer.
Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Academy in Sunset Park will permanently close at the end of the school year in June, its Board of Trustees announced last week, more than a century after it opened.
The K-8 academy has been facing “unsustainable enrollment and financial trends” for the last five years, according to the Diocese of Brooklyn. In 2020, 174 students attended OLPH. During the 2024-25 school year, just 111 students attended, and only 85 were enrolled for the upcoming year.
With enrollment so low, OLPH would have been spending more than twice the cost of tuition on each student, per the Diocese — tuition runs $5,500, and the per-student expenditure would have been $11,600.
The Diocese conducted a “thorough analysis” to see if the school could be saved, said Deacon Kevin McCormack, superintendent of Catholic schools in Brooklyn and Queens. But the “pattern of student enrollment” and the academy’s financial situation made recovery impossible.
“Since 1917, Our Lady of Perpetual Help has been educating students in both the faith and academics, and this decision to close will not erase the success of the past 108 years,” McCormack said.
The Diocese will work with OLPH families to ensure students can be relocated to nearby Catholic schools, according to the a from the Board.
“St. Ephrem Catholic Academy, our closest partner school, has been especially generous in preparing to welcome our students and keep the spirit of OLPH alive,” the letter states. “We are committed to assisting every family in furthering their child’s education in a Catholic setting.”
The school year will finish as planned, the letter says, and students will still receive their First Communion and Confirmation. The Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, the church attached to the school, will stay open.
About 13 teachers are currently employed at OLPH, per the school’s website. John Quaglione, a spokesperson for the Brooklyn Diocese, said teachers seeking positions at other Diocesan elementary schools “will receive support” in their applications, and said all principals are asked to give priority to faculty and staff of a school that is closing. The closure will likely also impact the Regina Opera Company, which has operated out of OLPH’s auditorium since 2012. Regina did not immediately return a request for comment.
OLPH opened as St. Alphonsus School in 1903, and had at least 1,204 students by 1910, according to the school’s website. Our Lady of Perpetual Help High School, at the same location as the academy, closed in 1994.
Families left ‘shocked and saddened’
Parents at OLPH were still processing the news of the school’s impending closure during pick-up on Tuesday afternoon.
Janelle Aguilar, a parent of three children at OLPH, said she was “shocked and saddened” when she learned of the closure Friday evening. Aguilar, whose children are in kindergarten, fifth grade, and seventh grade, attended an informational meeting Monday where school faculty and Diocese representatives outlined options for alternative schools and promised assistance in the transition process.
“They told us they are going to try to help us through the process,” Aguilar said. Her children, particularly her 10-year-old son who has attended OLPH for eight years, are struggling with the news.
“They’re sad, they’re absolutely heartbroken,” she said. “Especially my son, who is more emotional and crying.”
Another parent, Alex, who has children in third and fifth grade, expressed frustration over the late notice, which he said has complicated his efforts to secure spots at other schools.
“We’re scrambling to find a new school,” he told the Brooklyn Paper. “Most schools we’ve looked at have already held orientations.”
Alex described the OLPH community as tight-knit, with parents and children treating each other “like family,” which he said has only added to the emotional toll.
“Everybody’s asking where everybody’s going, and obviously, everyone can’t go to the same school,” he said. “It’s gonna be tough, especially next year.”
He also questioned whether more could have been done to save the school, like recruiting new students, and criticized the lack of government support for private education.
“We pay taxes like any other parent,” Alex said. “I think our taxes should be used to subsidize some of their education. We’re trying to get our children a better education, and yet we don’t get help from the city government.”
Luis, a Bay Ridge resident picking up his seventh-grade brother from OLPH on Tuesday, echoed the concerns of many families.
“Having just a few months left, and looking for a nearby Catholic school, it’s having a big impact,” he said. His brother, he added, is worried “worried because his friends are going to different places that are a little too far.”
A trend for local Catholic schools
Our Lady of Perpetual Help will be the fourth Catholic school to close in Brooklyn in the space of a year.
In 2024, the Diocese closed the beloved Visitation Academy in Bay Ridge, as there were only two nuns remaining at the Visitation Monastery, which sponsored the school. It also shuttered Salve Regina Catholic Academy in East New York and St. Catherine of Genoa-St. Therese of Lisieux.
Salve Regina and St. Catherine-St. Therese were forced to close due to “the pattern of student enrollment and the financial situation of each academy,” McCormack said last year in a statement nearly identical to the one issued about OLPH.
New York City’s Catholic schools have been struggling for years, though Catholic school enrollment across the country has remained largely steady. Still, Catholic schools in the U.S. have lost 14.2% of their student population since the 2013-14 school year, according to a recent report by the National Catholic Educational Association, and the number of Catholic schools in urban areas has been declining for decades.
Dozens of Catholic schools in New York City have closed since 2020, including six in Brooklyn in Queens. Last month, the Archdiocese of New York announced it would close two Catholic schools in the Bronx and that the buildings would be taken over by a charter school.
Charter schools are becoming steadily more popular in the U.S., according to the Pew Research Center, as enrollment declines in public schools. Enrollment at New York City public schools remained flat this year, according to Chalkbeat, but experts expect it will drop precipitously in the next decade.
Update 2/12/25, 10:32 a.m.: This story has been updated with comment from OLPH parents.
