Welcome! Thank you for checking out the SMM Alumni Page. As you have likely heard, our beloved St. Mary Magdalen Catholic School is closing on May 31st (this Friday) of this year 2022. There are many reasons for our school closing which I have explained below. My primary desire at this moment is to assist any interested alumni to connect with each other and possibly build up an SMM Alumni club so that any SMM Alumnus can network with other SMM Alumni for purposes of connecting with past friends, making new friends, or networking for business or spiritual purposes. My greatest desire is that all people fully turn their lives over to Jesus Christ who enhances all of our lives by introducing us to the Father and the Holy Spirit, helping us to prepare for our eternity with God.
On Saturday, May 21st, all SMM Alumni are welcome to gather here to join us for an alumni Mass at 4pm, followed by food/drink and fellowship. A handful of alumni have gotten together and have planned a "Sip and See" in the school cafeteria starting at 5pm. We will have light food and drinks (wine, beer, soft drinks, water) in the cafeteria following the 4pm Vigil Mass for all interested alumni. To cover expenses for this gathering, we will ask each alum who plans to come to donate $15 at the door. At some point in our gathering, there will be an opportunity to walk through the primary two school buildings in groups to discuss what has been going on at SMM School and a chance to reminisce the old days, lead by current teachers and principal.
This web page and future alumni gatherings will be dependent upon responses that we get and volunteers to maintain the site. At the gathering on the 21st of May, we will see if anyone wants to expand the SMM Alumni web page to include either graduation years and what they are doing or planning, or groupings of graduation years including contacts for the various grades.
As for the reasons that SMM School will be closing at the end of June: The most obvious is that we don't have enough students to help us pay all the bills--we need about 215 to break even, but dropped below 190 three years ago and plateauing right at 190. Specific reasons include competition from too many private and public schools in our vicinity (three private and one public a few blocks away); smaller families; fewer Catholics supporting Catholic schools; lots of competition among Catholic schools, and when not enough money is coming in, certain extracurricular activites have to be cut making it harder to compete; the 8th grade being taken away; Kenner Discovery with good science and math departments, all free; the stigma of us being a small school; rising tuition (although we have one of the lowest tuitions around); parents who for whatever reason cannot pay their child's tuition; not having a developed alumni program to draw upon for extra financial assistance; decaying physical plant which we do not have enough money to maintain with numbers below 200; not being able to take out a loan because of the Archdiocese being in Chapter 11.
There are many more reasons I am forgetting or choosing not to include and when taken all together, it is overwhelming and excessively clear that our only recourse is to close the school rather than continuing to siphon money away from the church (which can't afford it and would close in another year or two at the current rate) to the tune of about $200,000 a year (the past three years). As it currently stands, I am fighting to keep SMM Catholic Church open; it truly has potential for great growth and I invite everyone to come join us.
If I can be of any assistance to work with our alumni or to help you in your spiritual life, please feel free to contact me at my email at cdelerno@arch-no.org or by my office phone at (504) 733-0922. Thank you and God bless us all!