Jill Porter: Archdiocese shrugs off Christian values by blocking girl's schooling
GABRIELLE DeFELICE works in a pizza shop and finds it ironic when her friends complain about school. Because school is exactly where the 17-year-old wants to be.
GABRIELLE DeFELICE works in
a pizza shop and finds it ironic when her friends complain about school.
Because school is exactly where the 17-year-old wants to be.
She wants to be finishing her senior year, wants to be applying to college and going to the prom and getting her yearbook.
That's what we push our young people to do, right? Stay in school, get a diploma, go to college.
Which is why I find it astonishing that the Philadelphia Archdiocese has kept Gabrielle DeFelice from attending school this year.
Gabrielle's family owes money to Little Flower High School. Her father became desperately ill and was forced to go on disability.
The church won't release Gabrielle's transcripts until the family's $4,800 debt is paid - in full.
Their pleas and payment proposals have been turned down.
No transcripts means no enrollment elsewhere, no college applications, nothing but a painful limbo - and a poignant test of faith - for a teenage girl.
The church is unabashed about its policy. It won't release records to families who owe money because that's the only leverage it has to collect the debt, a church official acknowledged.
Gabrielle DeFelice is one of a number of students whose records are being withheld.
And if students can't attend school without those records? Well, so be it.
And if there's a profound contradiction between that policy and the church's role as a moral arbiter - well, so be that, too.
Gabrielle's father, Frank, had a massive heart attack the summer before her junior year. Little Flower helped Gabrielle stay in school that year with a tuition subsidy.
But the school said that she couldn't return for senior year. Gabrielle, who writes and draws and dreams of attending the University of the Arts, was devastated.
The family's plan to transfer her to public school was thwarted when the church also refused to release her transcript.
When Gabrielle's mother called Frankford High in the fall, she was told: no records, no enrollment. The same thing happened when Gabrielle's father tried to enroll her in a school in Runnemede, N.J., where he lives. The couple is divorced.
"You think to yourself: This can't be true," said Carole DeFelice, standing in the kitchen of her Port Richmond rowhouse.
The Philadelphia School District told me last week that the family had been given wrong information and that Gabrielle could be admitted without transcripts, so long as she has inoculation records and residency proof.
But when Carole followed through, she was told that without records, Gabrielle would be enrolled in ninth grade - instead of 12th.
Gabrielle can't take her GED until she's 18. And she wants a diploma, not an equivalency certificate.
"It makes me feel like a drop-out," Gabrielle said.
Bishop Joseph McFadden, head of the archdiocesan education office, said the church makes it clear at the outset - in the school handbooks - that transcripts will not be released if a family owes money.
"The challenge is, we can't run our schools without the money that comes from tuition," Bishop McFadden said.
"That's how we pay our teachers. It's not like public schools, where they take more tax dollars."
Withholding records is "the only thing we have to recover our money," Bishop McFadden said.
The church won't agree to a repayment schedule because once families get the transcripts, "they no longer come back and make the payments" he said.
But how can a church be so calculating?
"They're taking a very hard line. It's quite disturbing," said Runnemede attorney Sam Ragonese, who made a futile appeal to the church on behalf of the family to accept a payment plan.
Bishop McFadden acknowledged that the church may look harsh in this case.
"But are you writing stories about the $8 million we provide in tuition assistance?" he said.
"We do help people to the extent possible. It's not possible to forgive people's debts."
Frankly, that explanation leaves me cold.
There's no way a church - or any institution - can rationalize interfering with a child's education.
There's no way to justify the fact that Gabrielle DeFelice has been working in a pizza shop since September instead of being in school.
The sad truth is that while Gabrielle may not be in school, she is getting an education. It's just not the kind you want an impressionable teenager to get.
"Sometimes when she gets really sad, she gets mad at God," Carole said of her daughter.
"And that's what I don't want her to do." *
E-mail porterj@phillynews.com or call 215-854-5850. For recent columns: