This week, a Catholic school in Evergreen Park, Illinois, made a covert announcement that it will not be reopening in the fall. No grandiose press conference. No forum for the community. Families who had spent years—some of them their entire childhoods—inside those walls received a letter on Monday morning. After the 2026–2027 school year never starts, Queen of Martyrs School, which has been in operation since the 1950s at 3550 West 103rd Street, will permanently close.
Losing a local institution causes a specific kind of grief. The kind of slow, resigned grief that comes after you’ve suspected the conclusion for some time, rather than the acute grief of an unexpected loss. The numbers weren’t good, as anyone who watched Queen of Martyrs over the previous ten years could see. Those classrooms held more than 325 students in 2016. Enrollment had dropped to 178 this past year. It appears that Superintendent Greg Richmond of Chicago Catholic Schools decided enough was enough when projections for the following fall indicated about 140.
Despite his best efforts, Richmond’s letter to parents did little to lessen the blow. His arrival in June, when families have few options for the upcoming school year, was “especially difficult,” he admitted. He apologized. He pointed out that a school operating at that enrollment level just cannot provide the kind of education parents expect because fewer students translate into fewer resources. It’s difficult not to read between those lines and detect a deeper tiredness, a realization that faith-based optimism wouldn’t solve the problem because the math stopped working years ago.
However, Queen of Martyrs was dealing with more than just a decline in enrollment, which complicates the closure. It was revealed earlier this year that Brett Smith, a substitute teacher, had been employed at the school in spite of past accusations of child molestation. The archdiocese later clarified that he had used multiple aliases to get past fingerprint and background checks. Smith was later accused of battery against a student in Evergreen Park and of molesting a boy in Orland Park. The school was deeply affected by the revelation. In his letter, Richmond admitted that the scandal “shook the trust of some families and contributed to their decision to leave.”
It’s almost painful to read that understatement. By definition, parents who send their kids to a Catholic elementary school are putting a great deal of faith in the organization—spiritually, morally, and practically. Enrollment forecasts become nearly irrelevant when that trust breaks down in the most catastrophic way imaginable. Some families just weren’t returning, and it wasn’t their fault.
It’s important to remember that Queen of Martyrs is not an isolated entity. For years, the United States has seen an increase in Catholic school closures due to a number of factors, including declining birth rates, rising tuition costs, changing urban neighborhood demographics, and the pandemic’s aftereffects on enrollment trends. A similar story is unfolding in a different way across the Atlantic. In Scotland, the private Drumduan School, which was co-founded by actress Tilda Swinton, recently announced the closure of its kindergarten, citing the UK Labour government’s new VAT on school fees. Geographically, the pressures vary, but the result is always the same: once-permanent institutions are realizing they aren’t.
Queen of Martyrs served the communities of Evergreen Park and Mount Greenwood for about 70 years, and they deserve more than a June letter. 178 families are left in a difficult situation as a result of the school’s closure, and for the first time in recorded history, a building on the corner of a southwest Chicago neighborhood is silent in September. It’s more than a statistic. It’s the end of something that can’t really be replaced, neither by assurances from the archdiocese nor by a nearby Catholic school substitute. Some things leave an outline where they once were. The Queen of Martyrs is going to join them.
