(It's a) Holy Shame

A civil war is brewing in the Catholic school community between my high school alma mater and its arch-rival-yet-soon-to-be-new-home. Three thousand miles away from the action, I’m just now starting to catch up with the storm that’s overshadowed my hometown for the past couple of months.

Here are the basic facts as I understand them:

• The Allentown Diocese decided to close Reading Central Catholic High School (CCHS in Reading, PA).
• Said group also decided to merge CCHS with Holy Name High School (the Catholic school across the Schuylkill River) which has a better, more modern facility to continue to provide a secondary Catholic education for CCHS students and others in Berks County.
• Holy Name (HN) parents and alumni have banded together to create the ‘Save the Money / Save the Name’ campaign. Their premise is that changing the school’s name to reflect the merger is a money sink requiring excess funds to provide new stationery, uniforms, and signage and that it will hurt the institution financially by requiring them to rebrand, which existing donors may not support.

The first two points are a horrible consequence of low enrollment, a maintenance-nightmare of a building from 1941, and a sign of the times. The third is a tad more complicated.

I get the HN family’s passion about retaining the school name; we are all passionate about the things we care about most especially our homes and families. I can’t imagine any school or business wanting to change their identity after 50 years. However, tying this rationale to money seems to be more of a guise in assuming that the diocese only cares about the bottom line. Since the diocese wouldn’t agree to keep the school’s name just because these parents want them to, ‘Save the Money, Save the Name’ supporters are threatening to withhold church tithing and financial support of Berks Catholic.

With the influx of additional tuition from the new students, help from the diocese, and perhaps the addition of a fundraiser or two, the funds to update the school’s name can easily be attained. Money problem solved for the transition, now what about this issue of rebranding?

A brand represents who or what someone is at their core and how the world sees them. Hershey. Tiffany’s. The Home Depot. These are international brands. Changing their name would impact how they are viewed and the products they sell. But Holy Name? The Hill School and The French Schools it is not. Holy Name is a school in a Philly suburb that is on the crux of merging with another Catholic school in order to guarantee that secondary Catholic education can continue in Reading, PA. Though Holy Name provides a well-respected and well-rounded education, it is by no means exclusive and the majority of its students are there because it was a natural progression from their feeder schools.

By blending two school cultures, students, and communities, Berks Catholic is going to be a new and improved high school. It’s time to update its image and reflect a unified front to the local community, who I’m sure is just adding this debacle to the list of everything that’s wrong with the Catholic Church today (now there’s a brand that could use some rebranding). If donors and alumni can’t understand and support this decision to rebrand, well, then I think their actions to withhold money from the school speak volumes about who they are as individuals and not true alumni.

This isn’t a matter of having a handful of random students sign up at Holy Name. An entire school is transferring. They won’t be HN or CCHS anymore. A new moniker reflects change, compromise, and the merging of two well-established schools. [By the way, the current HN facility was opened in 1964 to serve the children in the western half of Reading, while CCHS continued to educate those from the eastern half in their original building from 1941. The point of this mini-history lesson is that prior to HN’s opening, all of these students were CCHS students. Fifty years later no one seems to remember that we used to be one—ONE—school. There was no us vs. them issue. Keeping either name today inevitably isolates one group.]

The debate and war of words waged by the HN parents and alumni is like watching the Charlie Sheen train wreck. They’re fighting hard for their side today and turning a blind eye to the future. I’m wary and confused as to why they don’t see that:

1. Standing up for their cause, as they say, is just showing the local community that the town’s Catholics are unforgiving, unaccepting, and unwilling to help the community as a whole. There are a couple hundred students without a home after June who are suddenly expected to give up their identity and assume that of their rival’s. (Imagine the Phillies merging with the Giants and having to become the new Giants. Would all Phillies Phans suddenly/willingly want to root for them?) These students are losing their classrooms, teachers, and everything they signed up for when they decided to become CCHS students and pay for a CCHS-branded education. They could have taken the more affordable way out and attended Reading High, Exeter, or Daniel Boone from the get go, but their parents chose to pay tuition instead during a time when every penny counts in our households.

2. The HN “forum” to keep the name is sending layers of other messages, not the least of which is that they don’t care about what CCHS students—not the parents, alumni, institution, or diocese—the STUDENTS, aka children, are having to cope with because of the merger. Honestly, if I was a current CCHS student watching the Holy Namers’ protest, wild horses couldn’t drag me to go to school there in the fall. Why, you ask? Perhaps because I would assume that if the parents and alumni are fighting this hard against accepting a simple name change to reflect a new identity that the Holy Name student population will be none too kind or accommodating to us when we get there. Being forced to switch schools would leave anyone feeling anxious, especially teenagers who already have to deal with the drama and social upheavals typical of their age group. No one’s expecting this to be a smooth transition, but instead of a welcome mat at their school, the HN forum just slammed the front door on already worried and unsettled CCHS students. And, to point #3…

3. “Save the Money.” If CCHS students end up not transferring to Berks Catholic or whatever it will end up being called, saving a few dollars on rebranding today will mean nothing in the long term when the enrollment they’re anticipating never materializes and they too will end up having to close their doors at some point in the future. The decision to close CCHS was based on money, but money shouldn’t be the primary focus of the merged schools in this phase of the transition. Topping the list of everything that needs to be worked out are the psychological ramifications, coping process, and emotional and logistical fallout for students on both sides. The decisions about the name, the changeover, new signage and stationery will naturally evolve from there.

I get that Holy Namers identify themselves as such and want to keep it that way, but all of the Central Catholic students, alumni, parents, faculty, and administration are part of the CCHS brand. Just because the diocese closed the school doesn’t mean that the brand will “POOF” instantly vanish when the students cross the threshold into the HN building. There has to be a new name and a new brand to identify a new, unified student body and a united HN-CCHS. The building doesn’t define a school; the students do. This will also be true in the new, blended school. The sooner everyone gets over the name game and starts investing energy and time in making the merger a positive experience for the students, the better off we will be.

Neither side is happy with this decision, but it’s not fair and supportive of student morale that one side loses itself completely while the other retains its name, facility, and brand. The Save the Name campaign is divisive, hurtful, biased, and worst of all has completely lost sight of everything that’s important—the well-being of our children. All our children.

Resource:
Reading Eagle