St. Catharine College in Kentucky is closing after an ugly and completely unnecessary fight with the U.S. Department of Education forced the small Catholic school in an insurmountable financial hole, according to the Washington Post.
It was just a few months ago that the small Catholic college filed a lawsuit against the Department of Education for withholding more than $1 million in federal loans and grants. Last year the Department said that the college hadn’t been granted approvals from the department for new programs. They claimed “severe findings” in their audit. The college pointed out that there was no reason to request approval from the federal department and that they had done all they were supposed to. But instead of admitting their error at the time, the Department withheld all loans and grants to students.
St. Catharine’s put out the money to students themselves, hoping that the DoE would come to their senses and reimburse them once the matter was straightened out.
So if you add up how much this cost St. Catharine’s, making up the missing financial aid as well as the the rejected reimbursement requests, St. Catharine spent over $1 million which was just about 10 percent of its annual operating budget.
Although government officials said their decision was made in error and promised to reimburse some of the money, the damage proved too much for the school to overcome.
The good news for the federal government is they now have a blueprint on how to destroy Catholic schools. Just a little government overreach of power, removing federal funds, and an unwillingness to admit error, and then bye bye Catholic school.
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