Maia Rottler, 12, Katelyn Roth, 9, Kate Fischer, 12, and Jacob Rottler, 9, leave the sacristy at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Zell, Mo., on Thursday, May 4, 2023, to be servers in a Confirmation ceremony Mass at the Ste. Genevieve County parish.
A Catholic elementary school in Ste. Genevieve County is the latest casualty of declining enrollment.
St. Joseph School in Zell, which serves students from kindergarten through the 5th grade, will close at the end of the current school year, the Archdiocese of St. Louis announced Monday.
St. Joseph currently has 27 students and was projected to have just 30 in the 2025-2026 school year.
Placement assistance will be offered to faculty and staff, the archdiocese said. It will also assist the school’s 17 families who want to transfer to nearby Catholic schools.
The parish’s preschool program will remain open, the Rev. Ryan Weber, pastor of St. Joseph, said.
St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Zell, Mo., photographed on Wednesday, May 10, 2023, is one of the oldest parishes in the Archdiocese of St. Louis dating back to 1847.
St. Joseph’s is one of the oldest parishes in the archdiocese, dating back to 1847. Its school was founded in 1863.
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Archbishop Mitchell Rozanski last week announced Our Lady of Guadalupe School in Cool Valley, with nearly 200 students, will close at the end of the current school year, a victim of “increasing costs and decreasing revenue.”
Three other Catholic grade schools closed last spring as part of the “All Things New” downsizing of the archdiocese: Little Flower in Richmond Heights, St. Monica in Creve Coeur and St. Roch in St. Louis.
View life in St. Louis through the Post-Dispatch photographers' lenses. Edited by Jenna Jones.
