January 23, 2010
Schools look to broader marketing techniques to combat drop in enrollment
By Denise MacLachlan
Herald staff
James Dickinson, first grade teacher at St. Philomene School in Sacramento, talks with a student in his classroom on a recent morning. Men make up half of the faculty at the school, which serves an ethnically diverse student population. Cathy Joyce/Herald photo
In dioceses throughout the nation, parents’ unemployment is high and students’ enrollment in Catholic schools is down. But at St. Philomene School in Sacramento, people aren’t wringing their hands. They’re too busy making their Catholic school work.
Principal Debra Mosbrucker has committed her school to be the flagship for the diocese’s public relations and marketing plan, an ambitious three-year program designed to attract and retain families in Catholic schools in the current uncertain economic climate.
“I could do all the things that I know how to do to increase enrollment, like host open houses for our school and parish community, pay for ads in newspapers, put up a big banner on the school,” said Mosbrucker, who has 30 years of experience in Catholic education. “I needed new ideas to help us move beyond what we already knew.”
St. Philomene is a commuter school near Interstate 80, she said, with many of its families living outside parish boundaries and dropping off their kids at school on their way to work. Many school parents have state jobs, she added, and those families are hard hit by furloughs that decrease their incomes by 15 percent, or by nearly one-third if both parents work for the state. Other school parents work in service industries such as plumbing or construction, or own their own businesses. Their family incomes have sharply diminished.
When the Loretto High School campus closed last year, Mosbrucker knew that her own school population might lose a few families. With its campus adjacent to Loretto, St. Philomene had been the preferred school for many of the high school students’ younger siblings, who planned to attend the all-girls school after their eighth grade graduation. Some of those siblings did leave. Then a public charter school opened last fall on the old Loretto campus, offering a free K-8 education. And then the economy got worse.
The circumstances that face St. Philomene School — declining enrollment and ongoing financial problems — face all 42 of the Catholic elementary schools in the diocese, according to Dom Puglisi, superintendent of schools.
“We’ve had close to a 6 percent drop in enrollment in the diocese from last year to this, which about matches data from other dioceses in the country,” he said, “and the primary reason is economic.”
Parents have lost jobs. In some Sacramento schools, the number of parents who are furloughed state workers has impacted school enrollment, Puglisi said. In the northern part of the diocese, charter schools are having a major impact.
The decline in enrollment is widespread throughout the diocese. Schools in Solano County, which typically have strong enrollment, have seen a decrease for the first time this year. Inner city schools continue to struggle as do elementary schools in the diocese’s rural areas. School enrollment in the diocese has now dropped for 11 consecutive years.
Puglisi told The Herald that public schools are also losing students to charter schools, which have the freedom to address some of parents’ concerns while still collecting funding from the state.
“Catholic schools address parents’ concerns, too, but unlike charter schools, we don’t collect ADA money,” Puglisi added. (ADA refers to state funding based on average daily attendance.)
In an August 2009 survey conducted in the Sacramento Diocese, 85 percent of parents who left Catholic schools last year cite the cost of tuition as their primary reason for withdrawing.
At St. Philomene School, Mosbrucker continues to do everything she can to help families, stretching her tuition assistance funds to cover an increasing number of requests and fundraising for more tuition assistance.
And she’s turning to experts.
The Diocesan School Board this year created the Catholic schools marketing plan with the help of board members who are professional marketers and public relations experts in the community.
Lynette Magnino, chair of the board’s public relations and marketing subcommittee and a communications consultant for Artful Messaging in Sacramento, notes that Catholic K-8 schools are “hidden gems” in the community, well known among a small segment of the overall population but virtually unknown to many families who value what Catholic schools have to offer.
Serving families from a wider segment of the population will help to stabilize enrollment and funding at the schools, Magnino contended.
The school board’s marketing plan recommends specific foundational marketing activities, provides step-by-step instructions in reaching specific, targeted segments of the population rather than making blanket appeals, and offers “stepped up attention to economic worries of parents, tackling how schools might try new ways to respond when tuition poses a significant barrier,” according to a copy of the plan obtained by The Herald.
“What I love about the plan is that people with expertise are advising us,” said Mosbrucker, who has already put the plan into motion. She’s identified all of the preschools, day care and child care centers in the zip code areas that her school serves, and is mobilizing a group of parent volunteers to hand deliver flyers to those businesses, inviting parents to the school’s open house and information night, scheduled during Catholic Schools Week Jan. 31 to Feb. 6.
“Our parents are the best ambassadors for the school,” Mosbrucker explained, adding that parents and teachers will welcome guests at the open house and answer questions.
She has convened a school marketing committee, made up of parents from each grade, to help implement the school board’s marketing plan. St. Philomene has an inviting Web presence, with a completely redesigned Web site, courtesy of a current parent, as well as a Facebook fan page that is attracting recent alumni in their teens and early 20s. Most people who call the school have already visited the Web site, Mosbrucker noted.
Community support for St. Philomene is not just a recent phenomenon.
Every Advent for the last decade, Mosbrucker has run a tuition assistance drive, asking local businesses and school grandparents for help for current families. This year the drive brought in $2,000. In 2007, St. Philomene received a bequest from a school family from decades past. The parents had left their house to the school, stipulating that proceeds from the sale of the house be used only for tuition assistance.
That money has made a profound difference to current school families, Mosbrucker said.
Former school families at St. Philomene Parish continue to support the their alma mater. For the last 25 years, a portion of the proceeds from the parish’s annual craft sale has been presented to the school. The school received $1,000 this year. And last fall, a former school parent proposed a Croatian bake sale to benefit the school. On a November weekend before and after Masses at the parish, two former school mothers, a current school parent and two current students wearing traditional Croatian dress, sold apple streudel, fancy cookies and other Croatian dishes to benefit St. Philomene School.
Mosbrucker noted that parents are loyal to the school because they’ve been part of the school family and know the importance of that community to their kids and to their own families.
Using the Diocesan School Board’s marketing plan, Mosbrucker is poised to get that message out to the wider community.
Ron Hamilton, the father of two girls at St. Philomene and a member of the school marketing committee, moved his daughters to the school when St. Lawrence School in North Highlands closed in 2007. His oldest daughter was in the second grade when she started at St. Philomene.
The transition was a little difficult, Hamilton recalled, but said it would have been a lot harder if he and his wife Michele had placed the girls in a public school.
“Catholic schools have a calm environment and offer a religious education — a moral and ethical education — that is not present in other places,” Hamilton told The Herald. Even though his family had to leave the St. Lawrence School community, they remained “part of the broader community of Catholic teachers, parents and educators,” he said.
“There are the same instructional themes at all Catholic schools, the same values and overall the same environment, so even if we have to transfer schools, the kids still have a positive experience,” he said.
As one of the school’s volunteer marketers, Hamilton looks forward to reaching out to parents who have similar values.
