"I am in tears and have goosebumps; I am shaking," said Donna Conway, whose son is a North sophomore. "We're all getting Facebook messages saying, 'Did you hear?' I pray that it's true!"
The word on the street is that North may be reincarnated as an independently run "Cristo Rey" school - a Catholic prep school targeted at low-income students whose families can't afford the $5,500-and-up cost of a Catholic education in this city.
Except, says Philadelphia Archdiocese spokeswoman Donna Farrell, the story isn't true.
"It's all rumors," Farrell told my colleague Val Russ on Monday, as Val and I worked to get to the bottom of The Rumor. "There have been no negotiations. North Catholic is not going to become a Cristo Rey school and, sadly, North Catholic will be closing in June."
Cristo Rey Network CEO Rob Birdsell was more equivocal. "I can't speak about the specifics of Philadephia," he told Val, neither confirming nor denying that conversations with the Archdiocese have taken place.
But a well-connected North alum familiar with The Rumor tells me that Bishop Joseph McFadden met with four heavy-hitting North alums last week - among them multimillionaire and philanthropist Paul Hondros - to chat about the school.
Also present were others with ties either to the Cristo Rey Network or to the Society of Jesus - the Jesuit order of priests that created the Cristo Rey model.
"They even toured North Catholic on November 11," said the source. "To say that nothing has been discussed isn't true."
Hondros was unavailable for comment yesterday, so I hoped the Rev. Timothy Lannon could enlighten me about what might've gone down in the meeting. Lannon, the Jesuit president of St. Joseph's University, is a close friend of Hondros' (a loyal St. Joe's grad who funded the university's new autism center).
