Prometheus 6

They inhabit an area, reconstructing it to suit their needs and fashions, clearing out the competition. Then when entropy menifests and the area runs down, they move, letting their previous habitation lay fallow, and displacing another population which flows into the abandonded area.

“They just want us out to make room for the new and improved people,” Ms. Velasquez said. “There is a plan for this neighborhood. I mean, look at First Avenue. They got doormen! It’s all connected. Look at Second Avenue. Why do they want to finish the subway now? These are not different issues. It’s all connected."...

An archdiocesan spokeswoman said that the decision to close the school was the parish’s, but that the archdiocese accepted it. Nor was it tied to the recent announcement that another shuttered Catholic school in Greenwich Village will reopen as a Catholic academy, with annual tuition approaching $25,000, said the spokeswoman, Jacqueline Lofaro.

“They felt they could not support the school in its current incarnation,” Ms. Lofaro said. “What they plan to do is step back for a year and reopen it as some kind of parish school.”

In East Harlem School Closing, Talk of a Class Divide
By DAVID GONZALEZ

Lourdes Velasquez has seen it all in East Harlem. In the old days, it was a neighborhood for poor and working-class families. In the bad days, it was beset by guns and drugs. And now?

Doormen. New high-rise buildings. Higher prices at the local supermarket. Young couples pushing strollers that cost more than a month’s rent in yet-to-be-renovated buildings.

While she resented these gentrifiers who “discovered” the only neighborhood she has known for all of her 35 years, she also tried to ensure that her daughter, Chrystal, would be able to deal with the changes. She sent the girl to St. Francis de Sales School on East 97th Street off Lexington Avenue, paying $3,000 a year to give her the kind of Catholic education that enabled previous generations of working-class children to become professionals.

But now St. Francis de Sales School itself may be joining the gentry.

Ms. Velasquez and the other parents of almost 200 students in the school’s eight grades were abruptly told in early March that the school would close in June. But officials at the Archdiocese of New York, as well as other parents and clergy familiar with recent events, said they expected that the school would reopen in a year, possibly as a more expensive private academy or preschool.

“They just want us out to make room for the new and improved people,” Ms. Velasquez said. “There is a plan for this neighborhood. I mean, look at First Avenue. They got doormen! It’s all connected. Look at Second Avenue. Why do they want to finish the subway now? These are not different issues. It’s all connected.”

A little more than a decade ago, archdiocesan officials considered the school exemplary in its efforts to educate students in East Harlem. Then it was known as St. Francis de Sales & St. Lucy Academy, with some 600 students in two buildings. (Full disclosure: this reporter wrote a long article about the school’s success and was later made an honorary eighth-grade graduate).

Falling enrollment led to St. Lucy’s closing three years ago. St. Francis de Sales continued as its own school in its building on East 97th Street, serving the working-class families, even as new and more expensive housing was springing up all over the neighborhood, including a high-rise next door. Parents saw the school — located in a pristine, if bland, red-brick building — as a haven that nurtured their dreams for their children.

But as the neighborhood changed, so did things at the school. A new pastor, the Rev. Victor Muzzin, came in about three years ago, inheriting a school that had had a stormy relationship with its previous pastor. A new principal soon followed.

Father Muzzin said he arrived at the parish to find $1,000 in its account and the school in debt. The school, he said, now has a $250,000 deficit. Tuition was raised only recently to $3,000 a year from $2,600 a year. Numbers like that, he said, made it hard to keep it open.

“I am not the kind of pastor who wakes up and says, ‘Gee, I have a $250,000 debt.’ I saw it coming three years earlier,” Father Muzzin said. “There was no hope for me to save this school.”