Ah, yes, the old Catholic elementary schools of my "yut."

St. Valentine's church and school are above. This picture shows the typical setup that thousands of kids experienced back in the 1960's and 1970's. St. Valentine's parish is located four or five miles away from my old school and church, St. Germaine, but I couldn't find a picture of St. Germaine to display.

In any event, I wrote about my old school because it, like many Catholic schools, is struggling to maintain enrollment. If I remember correctly, we had two classes per grade when I was a kid at 30 to 40 kids per class -- a max of 640 runts giving the sisters migraines. This past year, the school was down to 86 kids.

Makes me sad because, I know now, the experience I had in that orderly universe, is one I wish every kid could have. The sisters beat common sense, solid values and knowledge about math, science and English into our noggins every day from grade one through eight.

You can learn more about Catholic school trends at the National Catholic Educational Association (ncea.org). And of course you can read about my experiences at St. Germaine Catholic School here.

The school's only hope is to merge with another. Hopefully that will be enough to sustain it a good long while... but the long term isn't looking good for a place that did so much good for so many kids over the years.