Lowell Plan

The Lowell Plan was an innovative but practical program that allowed Catholic children to attend public schools that were amenable to the religious values of the Catholic Church.

The establishment and survival of parish schools in Massachusetts was in serious question in the decades before the Civil War. The intense poverty of the immigrant Catholic population and the low priority given to the establishment of parish schools by the priests and bishops of the diocese combined to limit the number of parish schools in the state.

The majority of parish pastors were well aware that Catholic parents could ill afford to send their children to any school, let alone pay for the establishment of parish schools. In many Catholic households, children were needed as wage earners to contribute to the welfare of their families. Keeping the family together was their first priority and that meant that everybody worked. Parish pastors understood the plight of their flocks and asked for nothing more than the establishment and support of the Church.

Yet in spite of the poor response to the call for parish schools, there was some Catholic educational activity in Massachusetts during these years. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, the Diocese of Boston counted only a handful of Catholic schools in the state, and these institutions provided [Page 531]instruction for only a few hundred of the 12,000 to 17,000 Catholic children in the diocese during those years.

The one Catholic educational venture that did achieve a measure of success was the Catholic Sunday school. By 1845, Boston Catholic Sunday schools were enrolling more than 4,000 children per year and these schools continued to grow throughout the decade and into the 1850s. It must be said, however, that Sunday school was a short-term measure and parish schools in Massachusetts were virtually nonexistent in the years before the Civil War.

In this climate of inactivity there emerged in Lowell, Massachusetts, an educational reform experiment that was to have important implications for the history of Catholic education throughout the United States. In an effort to “consider the expediency of establishing a separate school for the benefit of the Irish population,” the Lowell Town Meeting of 1831 appropriated $50 for the support of the local Catholic school. At the time, most Massachusetts schools were affiliated with religious denominations and the grant to the Catholic school seemed the most logical way of providing for the education of Lowell's small but growing Irish population. The relationship worked well and, by 1835, Catholic education in Lowell was being supported with public funds.

The terms of the agreement between the town school committee and the parish pastors were straightforward. The committee reserved the right to examine and appoint all teachers working in parish schools; to prescribe and regulate the “textbooks, exercises and studies” used in the schools; and to examine, inspect, and supervise the school on the same basis as other town schools. The parish pastors insisted that qualified Catholics be appointed as teachers in their schools and that the textbooks contain no statements offensive to Catholics or the Catholic Church. The committee and the pastors mutually agreed that parish school buildings were to be provided and maintained by the parishes and that teachers were to be paid by the school committee.

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