SARAH J. GLOVER / Staff photographer
Betty Palmieri (center) talks with students Robin Amberson (left) of West Chester and Gary Pitman of Philadelphia at the tech academy at North Catholic.
Ronnie Polaneczky: Thriving tech school a casualty of North's fall?
IT'S BEEN TWO weeks since the Philadelphia Archdiocese announced it would close Cardinal Dougherty and Northeast Catholic high schools in 2010.
Parents at both schools are reeling, but the ones at Northeast Catholic (North Catholic, for short) feel especially hoodwinked. They say the Archdiocese made a promise - referred to in two newspaper articles - that North would remain open at least through 2011.
The headline of the first piece, published in a community newspaper in November 2006, trumpeted: "A Technological Miracle Promises Five More Years For North Catholic."
The "miracle" was a $1.5 million program, based at North and funded by alumni, that would train students and community members in information technology, computer repair and network management. Supposedly, the program ensured North's survival through 2011.
Thirteen months later, the North Catholic IT Academy opened. An October 2007 Inquirer story about it noted, again, that North would stay open until 2011.
"We met with Bishop [Joseph] McFadden," John Fries, a 1961 North grad who helped get the academy off the ground, told the Inquirer. "I'm an old-time selling guy, and it was one of my better selling jobs. He promised us five years, through 2011."
Based on that promise, some parents tell me, they enrolled their kids as freshmen at North.
Now that North will close in 2010, those parents are frantic about where to educate their boys for senior year.
"My son was excited about the IT program," says Joanne Giulian. "Now he won't graduate from North or get IT training. Both of his dreams are gone."
I called Bishop McFadden, the Archdiocese education vicar, to ask about that five-year guarantee. He said he had never made a blanket promise, even though the papers reported otherwise. He didn't try to correct the misimpression, he told me, because he didn't want to "throw water on the effort to improve the position of the school."
He said his hopes for the school's future had been predicated on the success of the IT program.
"I supported the program as it was proposed, which included the opening of a night school for adults," he told me. "Their fees would've helped to fund the bottom line of running the school."
It was hoped that the academy would increase high-school enrollment; it hasn't.
Also, he added, its adult-education component "never really materialized," so no significant income has been generated.
That's news to the academy's director, Betty Palmieri.
She was hired in 2006 to create the academy, which opened 11 months later. After a slow period during which she marketed the school, she says, admissions have swelled in 2009. This year alone, she says, the academy is on track to bring in more than $250,000 by the end of December from at least 78 adult students who will have paid from $1,500 to $5,700 for Microsoft and Cisco training.
Why, then, would the bishop say that the adult program never really materialized?
Maybe because the Archdiocese's enrollment figures for the academy don't include paying students who signed up after February 2009, during which enrollment has jumped.
"We've had phenomenal growth," says Palmieri, showing me the academy's facilities inside North. "It took time to get the word out, but our numbers have really taken off."
The adult students who travel to the Torresdale Avenue site four nights a week live not just in the community but also in suburbs like West Chester, South Jersey and upper Bucks County.
When North's closing was announced, she said, her cell phone "rang off the hook" from paying students worried that the courses they'd signed up for wouldn't be offered next year.
Timothy Whiteside, 50, is one of them. A computer-network engineer at Pfizer who's taking recertification courses, he recalls how, years ago, he took out bank loans for tuition at a technical institute that went belly up and never returned his money.
"I don't want to go through that again," he said.
Palmieri has been trying to reassure current and potential students of the academy's health.
"We're telling students that we will remain open," she says of the independently run academy, whose curriculum she plans to enrich with courses for the blind and learning-disabled. "Our funders say that, as long as
we're making money, it would be foolish to shut down. We might stay here, but we're also looking for space in this community."
Members of the alumni group who funded and direct the academy's mission declined requests for comment ("I don't want to get in the middle of all of that," John Fries told me). So I wasn't able to ask them where they'll funnel the academy's profits once North Catholic no longer exists to receive them.
But it would be nice if North's students were able, somehow, to continue benefiting from a venture that was conceived with them in mind.
Especially one that's doing so well.
E-mail polaner@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2217. For recent columns:
http://go.philly.com/polaneczky. Read Ronnie's blog at http://go.philly.com/
ronnieblog.
