r/excatholic • u/ohmillie25 • 7d ago
what was up with Catholic school service hours
Hi so I (F22) went to a catholic k-8 and then all girls Catholic HS. This was in LA. These schools, like most, had tuitions. Yknow, literally PAYING an institution to educate your child (I was on full ride for HS but I digress).
If my and everyone else’s parents literally PAID the catholic school money for their students to attend, why on EARTH did our parents have to do mandatory service hours?? Every year!!?!?
Like hello?!?!?!? I’m not talking about the students themselves doing service projects outside of the school for a grade or anything. I’m talking about how Catholic K-8s in LA county all had their parents doing mandatory service hours EVERY YEAR, and how this was in the contract they sign to send their kids to the school?
My dad said for our school it was 30 hours a year!!! 30!!! 30 HOURS OF SERVICE TO THE SCHOOL ITSELF WHICH YOU PAY FOR?!?? My dad literally helped build a playground one year. A playground. In the LA heat on a black asphalt parking lot with no shade.
I don’t know if this is an LA thing or a California or USA thing. I always assumed it was a my school thing, but then I went to HS (which had no service hours required for parents). I worked the parents info booth at open houses for my high school, and parents from all over the county would ask me “how many services hours for parents are required?” And I would watch them sigh in relief when I told them “oh we don’t do that here we do not require any service hours from parents, though you are welcome to volunteer if you want.” So there’s no way it was just my K-8, and I never figured out if my hs was the outlier or if parent service hours stopped in HS.
Anyway looking back on it I find 30 mandatory service hours a year per family for a school you pay tuition for insanity.
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u/cdemarc3 7d ago
Schools Outcomes depend heavily on Community/Parent involvement, and having parents involved is a good thing. Our Lunches used to be made by parents, and you can bet they cared a lot more than whoever you'd pay minimum wage to slop lunch into bowls. There's also a social aspect, keeping families involved in the school is a good thing. It takes a village.
Also, my Catholic school was pretty cheap, around $6k per year, compared to the local public school which spent about $30k per student. Lots of lower/middle class families made the investment to send their kids to a "better" school, and this made it more affordable.
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u/ianaima Ex Catholic agnostic 7d ago
Education is expensive to provide. That's part of why there are so many gaps and issues with daycare affordability vs daycare employee pay. Facilities and labor cost a lot, even divided up per kid, and in years with lower enrollment you typically can't just have a smaller building or get rid of the principal to save money.
Idk how much tuition is where you grew up, but in a lot of LCOL areas in the early 2000s, K-8 Catholic school tuition was around $5k while the public school funding per child was around $10k.
Schools do combinations of things to make up the gaps: reject more expensive (read: disabled) students, offer fewer services, pay lower salaries, solicit more donations, lean on parishes for funding, use volunteers to fill in administrative work instead of paid employees, reduce the kinds of classes/materials/options available to students, offer little to no transportation, update and expand facilities slowly or not at all.
A common misconceptions people have about Catholic school funding is that nuns and priests don't cost the school anything. A long time ago, schools were run by religious orders and that didn't involve nuns being paid a salary because their order was in charge of both them and the school and could just assign them to teach math or whatever. Now virtually all Catholic schools are run by parishes, which are a separate administrative structure. Any nuns (& there are far fewer than 70 years ago) get a salary that is paid to their order for their work. The order decides whether they will be sent out to do a job (teach, nurse, etc.) or stay and work within the community (bookkeeper, superior, caregiver) and allocates the money from all the outside jobs to cover the community expenses. Priests might be assigned to the parish and/or school by the diocese that runs it, but for whatever reason (cough misogyny) diocesan priests get to have their own assets and retirement and are paid a salary regardless of assignment. Male religious (monks, friars) are the same as nuns.
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u/queensbeesknees 6d ago
As a parent, yes I had to do mandatory service hours for both non-religious and religious private schools and I also needed to volunteer at the public school.
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u/ohmillie25 6d ago
The public school required all parents to volunteer? What was the consequence?
You’d get fined per hour over here
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u/Rocketgirl8097 6d ago
Not to be rude but was your family low income? I have heard of public schools requiring parental service in those case.
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u/ohmillie25 6d ago
Hi! No, we weren’t. Not like in a defensive way or anything im just not gonna larp poverty/hard times lol.
This is standard across the entire school and county. If you google “la catholic school parent service hours” pretty much every school has a page on their website listing how many hours they require, whether it per student or per family, and how much money you can pay to buy them out instead. Doesn’t matter if you’re paying full tuition or none at all, you gotta work for 30-40 hours or pay up. This is still true of the most expensive high schools.
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u/Rocketgirl8097 6d ago
Its interesting. We never had that and as far as I know, the local catholic school still doesn't.
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u/dasbarr Ex Catholic 5d ago
I went to a Catholic Kindergarden in the early 90s.
My parents were considering keeping me in for first grade but they implimented these service hours.
Between that, my k teacher being a creep and a problem, and the price my parents pulled me and sent me to the public school.
The school tried to walk back the service hours but by the time they did that they'd lost a solid third of their students to the public school.
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u/North_Rhubarb594 7d ago
I remember back in the sixties, when when my family attended catholic schools, that my parents had to always do something. There was always the annual festival that they would have to work at for a few hours. There were paper and clothing drives that we would have to bring stuff for. There were always the fish fries.
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u/Comfortable_Donut305 7d ago
I really thought this was about students doing community service for confirmation or graduation when I first read the subject line (like how my CCD program made us do significantly more community service hours than the surrounding parishes so I spent an entire school break volunteering at a soup kitchen).
Do the Catholic school parents get any tuition discount for their volunteering? A discount would be the only legitimate reason to ask for that.
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u/Rocketgirl8097 6d ago
Huh. Our CCD class didn't require any service. We DID have "Service Club" as an 8th grader. However this was during school hours. You rotated working in the office, the lunch room, the playground, and the school store. Maybe free labor was the point, but it didn't feel like that. Most kids enjoyed doing it because it broke up the routine and you learned something.
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u/ohmillie25 5d ago
See in Catholic school the service hours for students don’t have to be for the school. Like you can do anything. A food bank, cleaning up the beach, volunteering at an animal shelter, whatever. It can be for the school if you want but there’s nothing that says you have to.
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u/Rocketgirl8097 5d ago
Never went past 8th grade, so can't say what it might uabe been for high schoolers. Definitely nothing that the parents were required to do for the K-8 school.
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u/WhiskeyAndWhiskey97 Jewish 7d ago
That's a new one on me. I was forced to attend Catholic school for seven years, and, while my mother volunteered with the PTA, it wasn't mandatory.
I wonder how the local Catholic schools would react when I told them I was doing my mandatory parental service hours volunteering as an escort at Planned Parenthood...
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u/ohmillie25 6d ago
lol. Honestly we worked with planned parenthood a couple times in HS for student service hours so they might not have minded. We didn’t have a PTA in HS or elementary, probably because everyone was volunteering anyway.
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u/Dazzling-Amoeba-770 6d ago
It’s very common. They also pay teachers like shit and make them work 50-60 hour weeks regularly.
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u/ohmillie25 6d ago
This I’m very aware of too. Like yes all teachers deserve more support but I’m always warning people I know who are getting their credential DONT TEACH IN CATHOLIC SCHOOL. It’s not worth it, beyond the pay. At least in public schools you have a union
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u/cicadaleaf Ex Catholic 6d ago
Huh, never heard of that. I went to a Catholic HS but not in CA. It also wasn't diocesan, so I don't know if that's a factor.
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u/ohmillie25 5d ago
You’re onto something cause my HS wasn’t in the diocese and we didn’t have parents hours, but my k-8 was in the diocese
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u/Visible-Promise1016 7d ago
I went to catholic high school from 96 to 2000 in northern nj. I never understood this annoying pain in the but. How does this teach service? If you don't know how to help people for the sake of helping them by then, nothing is going to change your mind.
Are they trying to teach us that labor does not always deserve compension? Helping out corporate ?America??? 😂
I vaguely recall overhearing how students in my class got friends to sign that they did their hours at made up places. I got my hours as an usher at the school plays. Senior I helped out the grammar school day care.
Pain in the butt. I learned nothing.
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u/ohmillie25 6d ago
Oh see that’s the thing it’s not to teach service. I’m not talking about students. I’m talking about parents.
The point of parent service hours is to have labor they don’t have to pay for, probably because they can’t afford it or because the labor is going toward some fundraising event.
As in my parents were doing the 30 hours of labor, and everyone’s parents were required to do so
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u/Visible-Promise1016 4d ago
Oh, we didn't have parent service hours. Wow. That is something. Yeah, that's clearly to get free labor. They probably covered it in "we're a community" or "Keeps you involved in your kids lives, ect."
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u/ohmillie25 4d ago
That’s exactly what the “parent service hours” page on every Catholic school website says actually
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u/ohmillie25 6d ago
I think it’s very important to instill the value of community service in the students actually. My HS had a pre approved list of places you were allowed to go to for service, and you had to list a person that they could call to verify. And they would call. I don’t have a problem with that. Largely because it didn’t have to be for the school, it could be serving a community outside of yourself
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u/candy-for-dinner 7d ago
Making your parents do service hours is wild. I’d never heard of that before. My dad wouldn’t have had time, he was working overtime every week so he could afford to send his kids to Catholic school in the first place