"By the end, guys were having to sneak up here to help us work," said Carr. "A lot of wives were mad, and a lot of husbands were in trouble."
Two years of torching the weekends away requires a pretty good spark. In this case, it was the Archdiocese of Philadelphia's threat in January 1986 to close Roman, the oldest Catholic high school in the country.
The same threat now hangs over six other archdiocesan high schools who might learn something from Roman's recent experience. Not only did Roman dodge its death sentence, but the school and its long-suffering sports teams are now thriving.
"When I heard this announcment, it was like deja vu," said Ed Graham, a teacher who became Roman's development director during the 1986 crisis.
"We had been losing students for a decade. We had parish schools taken
from us and were left with a very small pool to choose from. We needed help to survive."
These days, Graham coordinates both the recruitment of eighth-graders to Roman and the fund-raising needed to help them pay tuition.
The school got a big hand when the archdiocese gave it permission to find students anyhwere in the Philadelphia area. Some people now argue that policy has hurt the newly threatened schools, who have been hemmed within strict geographical recruiting boundaries set by the archdiocese.
"I think it's a cop out to say other schools' enrollment problems are due to Roman's open enrollment," said Graham. "The diocese admits that its high schools attract only 62 percent of eighth graders from its Catholic schools. We've always looked at the other 40 percent as fair game, and we believe that unless we were here to help and to subsidize them, many of our students would be lost to Catholic education."
