The San Antonio Fundraiser

Although I hear regularly from several San Antonio visitors, mostly former parishioners at Our Lady of the Atonement who keep up with events there, I've heard remarkably few specifics about a $4 million fundraising campaign that's at least ostensibly intended to finish out the school addition, which is largely an empty shell, and which I've suggested all along is a fire and safety hazard in that state. A visitor sent me a photo of a billboard that now stands near the site. It gives as much as I've heard about the scope of the project (click on the image for a larger view):

Several questions come to mind. The first is that scope. What I originally heard from visitors was that the project was intended to finish out the school interior, but the details now include a new auditorium and events center, a second gymnasium, a catering kitchen, meeting rooms, and so forth. I've now got to ask if $4 million is going to cover all this. If some part of this is just a fancy way of saying "cafetorium", that might wash. But I simply don't know exactly what facilities currently exist in the school and how they fit in.

From our diocesan parish's experience, just normal facility renovations each summer are a major expense simply to keep the schools competitive, let alone expand them. It seems as though our parish parking lot is partly taken up with construction equipment every year just to maintain existing infratructure, and even projects like a new fence or new surface for the playground are separately funded. I'm just a moderately informed outsider here, but I'm wondering if this project has been adequately thought through, especially in the likely economic conditions over the next year or so.

Another question I have is exactly what's being projected here. Our diocesan parish hit my wife and me up for a fundraising project that was serious enough that we had to go back and redirect some income. To raise funds at that level with people serious enough to have the income to redirect, the proposal had to have credible detail. (The detail included, in at least some cases, whether people wanted to have a particular facility named after them, which at least shows a level of granularity that I'm not seeing so far at OLA.)

Are there project proposals or brochures that nobody's sent me? If there are, I'd like to see them. But so far, the impression I have is that the OLA parish is on a shaky foundation, even leaving aside a new fundraising project. Long-term problems, like churning in the school staff and administration, do not seem to have been solved. I'm told that school enrollment has been declining for some years as well. The visitor who sent the photo said, "This certainly is an ambitious project on the part of OLOTA considering all that is going on right now."

I would be interested to hear any other information visitors may have.