Contacts & Publisher

Subscription Form

Faith-based schools
Broader community support needed, says director of non-public schools group

Joe Kohn of The Michigan Catholic
Published August 24, 2007

Joe Kohn | The Michigan Catholic Brian Broderick, a member of Our Lady of Good Counsel Parish in Plymouth, in July became executive director of the Michigan Association of Non-public Schools.

Brian Broderick, a member of Our Lady of Good Counsel Parish in Plymouth, in July replaced Glen Walstra as executive director of the Michigan Association of Non-Public Schools. MANS advocates before the Michigan Legislature for Catholic and other Christian schools. Broderick attended several Catholic schools — St. Luke in Detroit, Detroit Catholic Central High School, Notre Dame University in South Bend, Ind., and the University of Detroit Law School. He had served as education policy associate for the Michigan Catholic Conference, the Church's public policy voice in Michigan.

Broderick spoke with Michigan Catholic reporter Joe Kohn on Aug. 13 regarding MANS, its activities, and its member schools. The following is an edited transcript of the interview:

What should school parents know about MANS?

MANS is faith-based schools, made up of the Catholic schools, Missouri Synod Lutheran schools, and Christian Schools International. We do advocacy work and we provide services for our schools, parishes, congregations and churches to help educate the children and assist the teachers in what they do, assist the administrators in what they do, provide a statewide voice for those schools.

We're called nonpublic schools, but we're a niche of nonpublic schools. We're faith-based schools.

Is every school in MANS a Christian school?

Yes.

What's it like representing faith-based institutions in Lansing?

It's a challenge. Part of the challenge we have in Michigan is the economy. It's really impacted how everybody looks at everything. In Lansing, the concern is the economy and the Michigan state budget. So the faith-based perspective, while I think it's important, doesn't necessarily come to the forefront too frequently, at least in the last six months.

They're doing well. If you look at test scores and if you look at the performance of students at nonpublic schools, they are on the high end if you compare it with the rest of the population. Now, our schools have the same struggles that a public school system would have in terms of dollars and parental involvement.

But, on the whole, I think we're doing well. The economy, again, has impacted our schools and enrollments, and that's an issue we have to grapple with. That, and just the demographic changes — if you look across the country there just aren't as many kids being born — it's a significant difference.

Some of our schools are ahead of the curve, others are behind the curve, and probably the vast majority of them are right where they should be, where it's economically feasible for them to be. I can't speak specifically for the whole association, but I think that's probably the biggest challenge we have for our schools is to keep up with the technological changes we have going on.

You're going to have to succeed in the knowledge economy, and we need to educate children so that they're the creators of knowledge. I think everybody thinks that if you have technology and you teach children to access technology and you stop and that's it — that's fine. But there's another element our schools are going to have to move to, and that's to teach the child how to be creative and how to create software and how to create what you can learn on the computer. If we can do that, we're going to move ahead of the curve. We're kind of stuck in the model of education that we've had for the last 30 or 40 years, and other countries are moving beyond that.

Charter schools have been cropping up across metro Detroit in recent years. How have they affected nonpublic schools?

They've had impact. I know in Detroit they've had impact and I think they've had impact in other parts of the state, as well. A lot of the charters have been built up in urban areas. I know that they've had an initial impact on our schools. I think the number of students that have left, though, has somewhat stabilized. I don't think the charters are still drawing great numbers of kids away from faith-based schools. In fact, I think the statistics will show some of the kids actually coming back. They've gone to the charter, there are still issues there with curriculum and discipline and things, and their parents have said, "We wanted to try this, but now we're going to send our child back to that Catholic school, that Lutheran school, or CSI school."

So, there was an impact, but I don't think it's as large as people perceive it to be. In some cases, it's gone back the other way and some kids have come back to the faith-based school.

But MANS does support school choice.

MANS supports any options that are out there that the parents determine is what their child needs. MANS would be supportive of that concept that parents have choice.

Obviously, we want as many students to attend our schools as possible because we think they offer great opportunities, but, again, it's parental choice.

In the Archdiocese of Detroit, we've seen schools close in each of the past few years. Overall enrollment is going down. What's your perspective on this? Is there an end to this in sight?

I don't know if there's an end to it in sight. It's a trend that's going on nationally, so it's not just here in Detroit. If you look across the whole country, especially in urban centers, there's been a decline in Catholic school enrollment and therefore closures of Catholic schools.

One of the things that dioceses across the country are looking at is that support for the school has got to be from more than just the parents who send their child to the school. It has to be the entire parish, and it even has to be those parishes without schools at all.

The faith-based education has to come from the entire population in community, and not just those immediately impacted because they made a choice to send their child there. If we get that mindset back, are we going to open a lot more schools? I don't know, because the population may not dictate that we do that. But are we going to close them at the rate that we've been closing them? Maybe not. Because if we had dollars there that could help fund and support those schools, then we wouldn't need to close them.

The issue of significant tax-dollar funding for nonpublic schools has come before Michigan voters a number of times. Typically, it doesn't get much traction. Is the conversation about vouchers, or similar programs, over? Or is there some interest still there?

It's not over. It's never over. That issue has come before the Michigan voters since the late '60s when the Blaine amendment came in. (Blaine Amendments are provisions in many state constitutions that prohibit the use of state funds at "sectarian" schools.) That conversation seems to come up every 10 to 12 years, and I think it's only a matter of time before it comes up again.

We had a voucher initiative in 2000. There may be something coming up again. I'm not sure that there's anybody talking about it in the immediate future, but that issue will come up again. It may not look like it did in 2000. It may not be vouchers. It may be a tax credit. Maybe it will be something to roll back the restrictive nature of the Blaine amendment, so there's some opportunity in there to access state aid for nonpublic schools.

What's the best part of being executive director of MANS?

It's really going out and meeting the principals and meeting the people who are teaching our children. That's the exciting part.

I've had the opportunity the last couple weeks to go to the Lutheran principals meeting, the Diocese of Lansing principals meeting, and I'm going to be going to Detroit and Kalamazoo and Saginaw this week. Just the energy that's in the room when you meet these principals and those who are completely dedicated to teaching children — that sort of thing has been the best part of the job so far. You really feel it when you go in there. I feel it when I drop our kids back at school. One, it brings back a lot of memories and, two, it makes you hopeful for the future when you see the kind of kids in the schools that are part of MANS, what they look like and how they're turning out.