The New York Archdiocese is inviting youngsters back to a Greenwich Village parish schoolhouse it shuttered last year – at $25,000 a pop.
Now, working-class parents who had paid about $2,500 to send their children to the former St. Joseph’s School on Washington Place are calling its conversion to a private academy targeting well-heeled New Yorkers this fall the height of hypocrisy.
"It’s a slap in the face," said Bryan Delaney, a bar owner whose eighth-grade son was among 139 students bumped from the parish school when it closed.
"It’s getting away completely from what I thought [the Catholic Church’s] mission was – to educate people who don’t have that kind of money."
The hefty tuition at the new Academy of St. Joseph, which dips to $17,000 for half-day pre-kindergarten, would put its cost on par with such private heavyweights as Brearley, Dalton, Horace Mann and Spence.
It’s also as much as four times that of most archdiocese-operated high schools and many privately run congregational Catholic schools in the city, such as Cathedral or Rice.
"That’s more than a salary for most people. It’s disgusting," said former St. Joseph’s parent Aziza Marulanda, a bond-rating consultant whose sixth-grade son now attends a Bronx public school. "At the end of the day, the church is about business."
The academy will be run by the archdiocese, not a religious order, and serve students in pre-kindergarten through eighth grade.