For a third straight year, Catholic school enrollment has increased in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, school officials said Oct. 31, growing by nearly 9% from 28,618 students in preschool through high school in 2019-2020 to 31,011 in 2022-2023.
One reason was offering safe, in-person learning at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when many public-school campuses remained closed while offering distance learning, officials with the archdiocese’s Office for the Mission of Catholic Education said in a news release.
“The upward enrollment trend has continued as families learn about and experience the benefits of Catholic education,” the news release said.
Jason Slattery, director of Catholic education in the archdiocese, said “Catholic schools have always been dedicated to students and their families, and more families — Catholic and non-Catholic — are finding a partner among Catholic schools in the great responsibility of educating their children and preparing them for life.”
Seventy-eight Catholic elementary schools — including 77 preschools — and 16 Catholic high schools span the archdiocese’s 12-county region. With some schools serving preschool through high school students, the uptick in enrollment across those 91 schools began during the 2020-2021 school year, when the archdiocese’s leaders announced that Catholic schools would educate students in-person with safety measures in place amid the COVID-19 pandemic, school officials said.
That school year, Catholic school enrollment grew to 29,330 students. In the 2021-2022 school year, it grew to a total of 30,696 students. This school year, enrollment grew by more than 300 students, to 31,011.
