Last Friday, parents at South City Catholic Academy were told for the first time that their school was in financial peril—and that the Archdiocese of St. Louls planned to close it after the school year ends this spring.
Now they’re hoping for a hail Mary.
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Andrew Magdy, a parent with two kids at SCCA, says he first learned of the closure via an email sent 15 minutes after school pickup on Friday. “There was no author on the note, and essentially it was informing us of the school closure, citing increased capital expenditures at the parish level that would no longer allow it to help subsidize the school, and stating that the for the school to continue to run, the Archdiocese would have to contribute in excess of $675,000 a year.”
Magdy is a restructuring attorney uniquely situated to read what was between the lines in that email. He spent the weekend learning about canon law and then drafted a letter to the Archbishop of St. Louis seeking a “Formal Request For Revocation Or Amendment Of Administrative Decree,” which is sort of like filing a lawsuit, only under canon law, which governs the Catholic church.
Parents are now hoping his petition can help reverse a decision that blindsided them. Brian Bettlach has family roots in St. Joan of Arc Parish dating back to his grandparents. When the parish closed its school nearly a decade ago, teaming up with Our Lady of Sorrows to jointly open SCCA, he enrolled his kids there instead. Then Joan of Arc itself closed. Bettlach’s family now attends St. Lucy, the new parish that merged St. Joan of Arc, St. Mary Magdalen, and Our Lady of Sorrows after the Archdiocese’s All Things New restructuring from two years ago.
Throughout all that change, his kids have grown to rely on the SCCA community.
“We’re just devastated. From my third grade daughter to my 78-year-old parents, it is just extremely tragic,” he says. His seventh-grader is particularly upset: Absent a miracle, he’ll need to start over for just one final year of elementary school.
While Bettlach’s family has no choice but to explore other options for next year, he isn’t ready to give up. He notes that SCCA has lower tuition than many Catholic elementary schools. He says he would have gladly supported an increase in tuition, or an increased contribution from the parish, if only they’d known—and wonders if it’s too late. “If they said, ‘Hey, if your [parish] gives $300,000 like you used to, and you raise tuition, you can have this school again, we would be through the moon on that,” he says.
The Archdiocese says that it tried to make SCCA’s finances work for its nine years of operation, but revenue declines at St. Lucy made that impossible.
“In order for South City Catholic Academy to complete this school year, the Archdiocese of St. Louis will spend $675,000,” it said in a statement. “If operations were to continue, this number would be increasing substantially for the 2026-27 school year. The archdiocese, St. Lucy Parish and South City Catholic Academy are unable to shoulder these costs.
“We recognize that this feels sudden for those who have been impacted, but we wanted to make this announcement in time for faculty and staff to find other employment opportunities and for students to be able to enroll in a Catholic school that is a good fit for them and their families.”
Magdy, however, is not convinced. His argument to the Archdiocese has two components: first, a financial one, and the second having to do with community engagement. He says that the school’s abrupt closure violated Canon 50, which requires meaningful discussion and consideration with members of the parish before you take an action. That, he and Bettlach agree, never occurred.
As for the finances, the Archdiocese has suggested the problem is that the two parishes used to kick in a combined $300,000 to the school’s operation, but now sends in only $150,000. That’s been blamed on Our Lady of Sorrows’ debts. But, Magdy notes, it’s the Archdiocese it’s indebted to.
As he wrote in his formal request to the Archdiocese, “The closure decision appears to be driven not by school-level operating insolvency, but by the internal Archdiocesan financial structuring and debt enforcement choices that eliminated OLS subsidy capacity, while Archdiocesan funding levels remain capped.” (The Archdiocese says that’s not true.)
“I tend to believe that through minor tuition adjustments and additional fundraising from the parents of the 220 children at the school, that isn’t a large ask,” Magdy says. “That could be come up with rather quickly.”
Will they get the chance? Few parishes that appealed closure decisions during All Things New were successful, although at least one (St. Richard in Creve Coeur) did earn a reprieve from the Vatican. Absent the community engagement argument carrying the day, SCCA may have a harder time making its case: There are six Catholic grade schools in a five-mile radius from its current home, some of them with capacity, a vestige from the time that St. Louis was a far denser, and far more Catholic city.
For families that have made their community at SCCA, that is no consolation. “It’s just hitting my family so hard because of the suddenness of it,” says Bettlach. “We don’t know the next step.”
Magdy says he’s willing to take his case all the way to Rome, if it comes to that. After diving into canon law, he now knows that if the Archdiocese doesn’t respond, or if the response “is not adequate,” he has the ability to appeal the decision up to what is called the Dicastery of Bishops, a department of the Vatican.
