Parents of Catholic school kids forced out when their Green wich Village Catholic school was shuttered reacted with righ teous indignation – and outright laughter – after learning that 140 students had been displaced to make room for a high- priced academy that’s now serving just two pupils.
“We’re laughing our asses off, we’re mad as hell,” was how Elizabeth Guzman, 37, characterized her reaction to the enrollment numbers at the $25,000-per-year Academy of St. Joseph, reported first in Tuesday’s Post.
The academy was opened in September at the site of a 150-year-old parish school that was shut down last year amid a massive reorganization by the Archdiocese of New York.
Guzman’s daughter, Lyjah, now an eighth-grader at St. George Elementary School in the East Village, had attended St. Joseph’s from pre-kindergarten through sixth grade.
“It’s poetic justice that there are only two students there,” Guzman, a taxi driver from Manhattan, said of the academy. “I was very angry when I saw the article – we went through all this crap for nothing.”
Bryan Delaney, of Manhattan, whose son Gabriel was in seventh grade when St. Joseph’s closed, also couldn’t help but chuckle when he learned of the academy’s woes.
“I think it’s laughable,” he said. “I know they’ve got to start somewhere, but two kids? It kind of seems like pretty bad planning.”
A spokeswoman for the archdiocese said Monday that the low enrollment, consisting of one pre-kindergarten and one kindergarten student, had been anticipated because the project got off to a late start.
But another mother among the dozen or so families relocated from St. Joseph to St. George said that the current renovations to the five-story academy – including a new assembly hall, science lab, art studio and playground – should have benefited far more than just two students.
“I think it’s awful,” said Elizabeth Lewis of Brooklyn. “They could have redid the school for the students that were there already – all that money gone to waste.”
Additional reporting by Kevin Fasick