The Catholic World, Vol. 09, April, 1869-September, 1869Various
Religion
The Catholic World, Vol. 09, April, 1869-September, 1869
Various
Catholic Church -- Periodicals
The above statement embraces but nineteen of the fifty-two
dioceses and archdioceses in the United States, as it would
extend this article to an unreasonable length were we to
undertake to give the statistics of each; which, in regard to
many of them, are not sufficiently full in the _Directory_
to enable us to present satisfactory results.
{134}
Although in many of them the Catholic population is small and
sparse, our readers would nevertheless be surprised, no doubt, to
see how each one has struggled to supply itself with schools and
charitable institutions; and how amazingly they have succeeded,
when we consider the comparative scantiness of their resources.
We have, however, given enough to afford some idea to our
Protestant brethren of the vast interest which their Catholic
fellow-citizens have in this question of the public-school fund,
and of the great claim to the sympathy and good-will of the
country which they have established by their unparalleled efforts
in the cause of popular education.
As we have shown above, the Catholics of the archdiocese of New
York are educating twenty-three thousand of their children,
nineteen thousand within the city limits. The value of their
school property is placed at eleven hundred and fifty thousand
dollars. For the education of these twenty-three thousand, it is
estimated that their annual expense does not exceed one hundred
and thirty thousand dollars. The actual cost of the Catholic free
schools in New York City is put down at $104,430 for nineteen
thousand four hundred and twenty-eight scholars; which is about
five dollars and a half for each. We have before us the _Report
of the Board of Education for 1867_, from which it appears
that "the cost per head for educating the children in the public
schools under the control of the Board of Education for the year
ending 1867, based upon the cost for teachers' salaries, fuel and
gas, was $19.75 on the average attendance, or $8.50 on the whole
number taught." Adding the cost of books and stationery, each
pupil cost $21.76 on the average attendance, or $9.40 on the
whole number taught. The basis of the above calculation is:
_Teachers' salaries_, $1,497,180.88; _fuel_, (estimated
in a gross amount of expenses,) $163,315.12, and _gas_,
$13,998.96, making a total of $1,674,496.96. But in fact the
_actual expenditures_ for 1867 were $2,973,877.41; which
cover items that enter equally into the estimate we have given of
the Catholic expenditures for school purposes. In that year New
York City paid to the state as its proportion of school tax
$455,088.27; out of which it received back by apportionment
$242,280.04, a little more than one half, the rest being its
contribution to the counties; at the same time the city raised
for its own schools nearly $2,500,000; being the ten-dollar tax
for each scholar taught, and the one twentieth of one per cent of
the valuation of the real and personal property of the city. From
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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