Denver, Colo., Jul 14, 2020 / 02:50 pm (CNA).- Though federal rule makers have clarified that coronavirus relief funds must help non-public schools, including Catholic schools, Catholic school advocates and other backers of private schools are working to rally support to ensure aid is distributed in a way that benefits all students.
Elias Moo, superintendent of the Archdiocese of Denver Catholic schools, said CARES Act funds could be critical to school operations. Schools need masks, funds for more cleaning services, and access to technology for school needs including remote learning.
“Our Catholic schools have been really hard-hit, as have families impacted by the pandemic,” Moo said. A drop in tuition payments has harmed school revenue, and schools linked to parishes have been hurt by declines in donations to the parish offertory.
Moo said that federal coronavirus school assistance should aid students in both private and public schools, and that some parish schools are depending on the help.
“We want to open our facilities in a safe and healthy manner but we also know that there are financial challenges. Without this funding, it will be a real challenge for some schools to be able to open effectively and safely,” he told CNA.
“Private schools have been impacted by COVID-19 at the same rate as public schools have, and in some cases more heavily,” Ross Izard, national director of public policy with the private school scholarship fundraiser and school choice advocate ACE Scholarships, told CNA July 10.
“These schools are hurting. They’re in need of help. They’re in need of aid,” said Izard. His Colorado-based ACE Scholarships works to provide partial tuition scholarships to K-12 private schools for low-income families. It also advocates for school choice. The organization is active in eight states and served 7,000 children in 800 schools in 2019.
The interim rule’s goal, according to Izard, is equity, the need to ensure “the same treatment for private school students as public school students.”
ACE Scholarships has asked its supporters, its families, partner schools and partner advocacy groups to circulate a letter and submit comment to the federal government in support of private school support.
“COVID-19 has devastated all sectors of education, and private schools have not been spared,” the letter says. “These schools, many of which are small and lack the resources of larger school districts, are struggling to safely and effectively serve their families as a result of the pandemic.”
“For many private schools, CARES Act equitable services will provide the emergency assistance needed to ensure that students can return this fall for a safe, successful school year. These schools should be entitled to a full, fair share of CARES aid in accordance with the law and previous U.S. Department of Education Guidance.”
The rule is open for a 30-day comment period, ending July 31. Izard said that people “have an opportunity to make their voices heard.”
“We are anticipating that the folks who are opposed to private schools generally, or to school choice, are going to participate at a very high level in that public comment campaign,” he said. “We want to make sure the U.S. Department of Education is hearing from the schools and the families in the private sector about how important that aid is to them.”
The Department of Education rule was previously non-binding guidance. Since funds are distributed through state and local education agencies, education officials in several states had ruled that private schools would receive fewer funds than many schools deemed sufficient.
In early June, before the new federal rule was announced, the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference asked the U.S. Department of Education to reverse state decisions that gave insufficient coronavirus relief funds to Catholic and other private schools
Before the guidance became a mandatory rule, the Colorado Catholic Conference had circulated an action alert objecting to Colorado officials’ decisions. Education officials had disregarded federal guidance in a way that withheld relief funds for Catholic schools, the conference said.
“Without a fair share of relief funding for our Catholic schools, our already financially stretched Catholic schools will be faced with an additional hardship in trying to absorb the expenses needed to ensure schools can reopen safely and continue to provide a quality education to students in the midst of a pandemic,” said the action alert.
Brittany Vessely, executive director of the Colorado Catholic Conference, explained the motivation behind continued advocacy for relief aid to Catholic schools.
“We’re talking about being treated equitably and fairly based upon a pandemic that has impacted everybody,” she told CNA. “We want to make sure that relief funding gets to our schools and to our students.”
“All families have been impacted by the coronavirus, we are all in this together,” she said. Any state or local education agency that tries to block funding to non-public schools, she said, is being “discriminatory” against families that have chosen these schools as “the best education option for their child.”
Relief funds in the large east Denver suburb of Aurora, Colorado are distributed through the Aurora School District, one of the largest districts in the state. But the school district decided to postpone a decision until December.
In Aurora, the postponement meant a loss of “significant funding” Catholic schools were expecting, said Moo, who worried other districts in the state might delay the provision of resources.
“Now we’re scrambling to figure out how to pay for certain things that are needed from the first day of school, when students are back,” said Moo, adding that the Catholic archdiocesan schools are considering how to fund raise for some of the costs.
Corey Christiansen, public information officer for Aurora Public Schools, told CNA that the Colorado Department of Education has set December as the deadline for the allocation of these funds.
“Guidance on COVID-19 related federal funds has been limited in general and has changed several times since the original allocations were made,” he said. “We intend to apply and hope that additional clarification from Congress, the U.S. Department of Education or (Colorado Department of Education) helps clarify guidance prior to the December deadline.”
Jeremy Meyer, director of communications for the Colorado Department of Education, told CNA that in the department’s view, the CARES Act requires that local education agencies “must provide equitable services to students and teachers in non-public schools, not direct funding.” Control of the federal funds must remain with the local agency. Calculations for these services have been “in flux” due to differences between the act’s language and the federal guidance.
“The reality of education is that it’s an ecosystem,” Izard told CNA, who added both public and private schools serve the same neighborhoods and the same people.
“What happens to one sector is going to impact the other sector,” he added. “If private schools don’t get what they need in the form of emergency aid, and they’re not able to effectively serve their students, those students have to go somewhere.”
“That can result in really significant costs on taxpayers and on the public system.”
Moo echoed Izard’s description of schools as an ecosystem.
“We really see ourselves as collaborators with public forms of education in the overall educational efforts in our state,” Moo told CNA. “In this educational educational ecosystem, here in Colorado in particular, we would say there is a symbiotic relationship between public and non-public education.”
“Our mutual strength ultimately ensures that children in Colorado are properly educated,” he said.
Under the new federal rule, two options are provided for local authorities. The first option requires that if a local education agency uses CARES Act funds for students in all its public schools, it must calculate funds for private schools based on all students enrolled in private schools in the district.
Under the second option, a local agency may choose to use funds only for students in both public and private schools with a high concentration of low income students, a program known as Title I.
According to Vessely, 17 states have decided to distribute funds proportionate to all private school students, while 21 states will follow the option to distribute funds proportionate to Title I beneficiaries in public and private schools.
Five states, California, Maine, Michigan, New Mexico, and Wisconsin, have filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, claiming that the federal rule unlawfully interprets the CARES Act in a way that diverts relief funds from public schools to private schools.
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said July 7 the lawsuit is “about stopping the Trump administration’s latest effort to steal from working families to give it to the very privileged”
Department of Education Press Secretary Angela Morabito said that “this pandemic affected all students, and the CARES Act requires that funding should be used to help all students.”
In Vessely’s view, the states’ lawsuit is unlikely to succeed.
“The majority of this country is not going the lawsuit route,” she said. There’s not a lot of precedent for them to win something like that.”
Vessely said that Catholic schools in Colorado serve a large number of low-income students.
Moo noted the high number of schools providing federal nutrition programs… and some schools serve a high percentage of students who qualify for free or reduced lunch programs.
“This idea that our schools are for the wealthy or the affluent is not entirely rooted in the reality we live everyday.” he said, pointing to Catholic school success in helping students from disadvantaged backgrounds to close gaps in achievement with public school peers.
Moo said Catholic education is “an education rooted in cultivating the virtues.”
“That’s for everyone, not just the affluent,” he added.
The National Catholic Education Association has said Catholic schools should be included in the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions Act, known as the HEROES Act, which is now before Congress.
Ten percent of any new Covid-19 education funding should go to emergency grants to low- and middle-income private school families, the organization said. Both private and public schools have been hard hit by the epidemic and its economic effects, and any children who are forced to enroll in public school would further burden the public school system.
The NCEA is also advocating a “comprehensive” federal tax credit to ensure long-term funds for education.
[…]
How about in Los Angeles where a couple days ago an ex-boyfriend shot and killed his ex-girlfriend in cold blood in a driveway right in front of her three year-old daughter? He doesn’t deserve the death penalty for snuffing out that woman’s life and scarring that little girl forever besides depriving her of her mother? Get real. Executing murderers shows respect for life: for the lives of innocent victims snuffed out by the criminals. Not to execute such murderers is to disrespect life.
From an Old Testament and Pauline perspective, the death penalty is admissible. But ´in the light of the Gospel´, it is not.
https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2018/08/02/180802a.html
https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2018/08/02/180802b.html
See my two comments toward the bottom of https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2020/10/07/three-questions-for-catholic-opponents-of-capital-punishment/ – due to other preoccupations, it will take much more time to respond to the points raised in that article.
Update on this: the perp killed himself while being chased by police in Texas. Saved our society the trouble of a trial and executing him. He should have just offed himself before killing his ex girlfriend. Oh, he was a member of MS-13 gang too. Nope, some people forfeit their right to life.
[“The government is us, in the end. And we’re responsible,” he said of the executions.]
Infallibility is not given to bishops for judgments of particulars and on this point he is wrong. (As he is wrong on capital punishment.)
Agree.
Somewhere in his earlier and voluminous writings, the theologian von Balthasar observed that the death penalty is partly an expression of belief in eternity. That things don’t end here. That no one is extinguished. To see with lesser eyes is to settle for a flat universe with no redemption or salvation beyond history and the curvature of the earth.
Without pretending to parse “inadmissible” or how this teaching applies to particular cases, are we challenged with a much broader QUESTION? Here, a quote and a speculation:
FIRST, as a condition of membership, states of the secularist European Union do not permit the death penalty. Reading Pope St. John Paul II in this context, we find that “such cases [the need for the death penalty] are very rare, if not practically non-existent” (Gospel of Life, 1995, n. 56); AND that this teaching segues into and prefaces the next: “If such great care must be taken to respect every life, even that of criminals and unjust aggressors, [THEN] the commandment “You shall not kill” has absolute [!] value when it refers to the innocent person [italics]. And all the more so in the case of weak and defenseless human beings….” (n. 57). And yet, abortion is legal and more-or-less routine across all of the secularist European Union and beyond…
SECOND, where current history records the past “Age of Faith,” will future history give us the “Age of Oblique Evangelization?”
Features might be: (a) now “inadmissible” capital punishment, partly to reform—from within—secularist contradictions (the above nn. 56 and 57, together), (b) the Abu Dhabi Declaration’s “pluralism of religions” and human “fraternity” to co-exist with Islam as a (an equivalent?) syncretic artifact of natural religion, (c) “synodality,” even the “binding synodal path” of centripetal Germania, to euphemize the anti-apostolic “tyranny of relativism,” (d) the “provisional” China Accord to avoid a disinterred 12th-century Investiture Crisis, (e) inconclusive “dialog” with president-elect Biden (his cafeteria-Catholic “congruence” with the perennial Eucharistic Church) to muffle any evolving Pact with the World, and (f) in curial reform, speculated eclipse of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith by a more “accompanying” Secretariat of State.
How can the Church still evangelize—from within?—a world which has forgotten, despises and no longer even comprehends the proposed (not imposed) language and vocabulary of the Faith? Can evangelization be done obliquely?
You argument dismantles itself by attempting to set the revelation of the Evangelists in opposition to the revelation of St. Paul the Apostle.
No.
Am too tied up and do not have time on my hands to present my viewpoint in detail (hoping to do so sometime in the future).
But for now, sufficeth to say: St. Paul in Rom. 13 is looking at and speaking about governing authorities of the world who, with all their shortcomings, can only impart imperfect / partial justice. And neither the Old Testament nor St. Paul are wrong in their perspective.
But those perspectives do not mean that they are the be-all and end-all of all perspectives.
Perfect justice and mercy as perceived from the lens of the Gospel and which the Gospel points to can only be found in the Authority who Governs from the Cross.
(Segue to 1 Cor. 13)
Move over, Saints Paul, Augustine, Thomas, Augustine, Alphonse Liguori, Robert Bellarmine, etc. and every pope at least through Pius XII (and probably Benedict XVI) – JN and Francis are here to set the record straight.
Very droll.
Presuming we will be alive for a bit, we can always wait for the next Popes after Francis to see if they or an ecumenical council revoke or affirm the revision to CCC 2267.
Of course, if we are going to talk about the ´St. Gallen mafia´ and how Francis has decked the cards for the next conclave, perhaps we should also have a discussion about the magisterium of the SSPX or the magisterium of the folks at https://novusordowatch.org/ who get to certify the false popes.
It is unpersuasive for bishops to appeal to the opinions of the pontiff who orchestrated idolatry, and who bases “his fiats” on the assumption that he and his like-minded cohort are morally advanced as compared to the millions of people who disagree with him, and the millions-upon-millions who preceded him, including popes and apostles.
2nd try…
It is unpersuasive for bishops to appeal to the opinions of the pontiff who orchestrated idolatry, and who bases “his fiats” on the assumption that he and his like-minded cohort are morally advanced as compared to the millions of people who disagree with him, and the millions-upon-millions who preceded him, including popes and apostles.
We have another bishop who misrepresents the history of Church teaching on capital punishment. As he must know the truth, we can assume it is deliberate. Protection of society was never the main justification for the death penalty, as Edward Feser and others have documented amply. Furthermore, any bishop who speaks about whether modern prisons are sufficient to secure the population from the threat posed by murderers is offering a personal opinion (and not a well-informed one at that). Besides, the top guy at the Vatican also has told us that life sentences are impermissible.
The death penalty opinion of the idolator-pontiff is devoid of any reason other than his high opinion of himself.
Here is the statement published ob behalf of the idolator-pontiff, by the Congregation for the Faith, inserting his personal opnion in no. 2267 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church in 2018 (in brackets I add letters to mark the main points – these leters in brackets are not in the original text):
The death penalty
2267. Recourse to the death penalty on the part of legitimate authority, following a fair trial, was long considered an appropriate response to the gravity of certain crimes and an acceptable, albeit extreme, means of safeguarding the common good.
[A] Today, however, there is an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes. [B] In addition, a new understanding has emerged of the significance of penal sanctions imposed by the state. [C] Lastly, more effective systems of detention have been developed, which ensure the due protection of citizens but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption.
[D] Consequently, the Church teaches, in the light of the Gospel, that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person”,[1] and she works with determination for its abolition worldwide.
Point A is an arrogant claim to enlightenment by the authors, and at best a foolishly presumptuous (and at worst an intentionally malicious) strawman asserted against any and all who don’t cotton to their flimsy opnion.
Point B seems on its face to be a statement devoid of any meaning, but may be a leftist dog-whistle blown to send a signal to those seeking sanction from the co-traveller now presiding in Rome. (Perhaps reading the pontiff’s associated letter to Bishops about his opnion may shed some light?)
Point C ventures the pontiff’s sweeping opinion that murderers can simply be effectively imprisoned everywhere on earth, which proposal from the pontiff we know to be “disingenuous” coming from his lips, since he has already condemned life sentences for murder.
Which empty premambles bring us to Point D, where the idolator-pontiff references no one but his idolatrous self, and regurgitates his flimsy strawman propped up in Point A, and shows no conviction, since he cannot call what he opposes immoral, because he is prevented from making any statement on morality, as he is bereft of moral authority, and enjoys nothing more than juridical authority, having been elected by sociopath-party run by Danneels and McCarrick.
Either the Catholic Church was wrong for two thousand years for upholding the licitness of Capital Punishment, after a fair trial and when necessary to safeguard society, or Francis is wrong now for stating it is always wrong regardless of circumstances. The former is impossible, as the Church is infallible and cannot err on such a subject for such a long period of time. The latter is possible, as Popes can and do err when Papal Infallibility is not applicable. Especially with Pope Francis’s record on being wrong on so many other issues (just war, private property, communion for those living in adultery, Idolatry, etc).