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In Monday’s Tribune Chronicle, Margaret Thompson wrote a simply excellent piece celebrating the legacy of John F. Kennedy High School, and mourning the loss of many Catholic schools in our community in the last decade.
The loss of so many faith-based schools in our county (including those run by Protestant churches) is truly a thing to be mourned. As the article points out, faith-based education is whole-child education: by including the spiritual in the most formational experiences of a child’s life, faith-based education develops better citizens, better communities, and yes, better communities of faith. Remember, a significant portion of the Tribune’s “20 Under 20” award winners were from JFK.
The mass extinction (no pun intended) of faith-based schools in our community is yet another symptom of what ails us: Trumbull County is facing an extreme deficit of young families. If you’re not sure about this, go anywhere but here to Akron, Canton, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, or even Youngstown and you’ll surely be amazed at how young and beautiful everyone is.
The simple truth is that it takes families with school-aged kids to keep schools open. While there are certainly other factors involved in keeping private schools going (i.e., tuition), the reality is that we might not be seeing so many schools close if there were more young families to populate them.
Literally every issue that faces our community cannot be solved if we do not solve our generational problem if the Valley keeps pushing its young people out to big cities across the nation, it won’t matter if we rehab houses in downtown Warren and if we attract businesses here. There will be no one to live in the houses and no one to work the jobs.
We lack young families in our community because we lack meaningful opportunities for them to take advantage of. Most of the jobs in our Valley aren’t worth staying around for. The ones that are worth it are so few and far between that there are better options in Cleveland or Pittsburgh or Chicago or Columbus.
While the bread and butter of our Valley has historically been in manufacturing, it’s no secret that this is no longer a booming industry in our communities. Even if it was, manufacturing jobs don’t get people to relocate to our community. We need to be creating jobs for young professionals that keep YSU and KSU grads here, and bring young families here.
It is incumbent on our leaders across the Valley to help create opportunities worth staying for, and to help make our community a hospitable place for young families to live. We’ll be able to keep schools and for that matter, businesses and restaurants open if we keep people in our community to go to them. We’ll be able to create new businesses if we are able to attract young professionals to our community.
That said, those leaders in our community who invest in faith-based education are to be commended for their hard work to keep these kinds of institutions open. Thanks for helping our community grow young leaders of character and competence!
Email Kyle Tennant at columns@tribtoday.com.