Rift widens at Charlotte Catholic
Some parents are calling for new leadership due to transparency concerns, while others say they trust the school administration
The following article appeared in the February 10, 2025, edition of The Charlotte Ledger, an e-newsletter with smart and original local news for Charlotte. We offer free and paid subscription plans. More info here.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article was published online on Friday, Feb. 7, 2025.
Meetings with parents last week failed to quell divisions over direction of Catholic school; videos show administrator referring to parents as a ‘culture problem,’ while pastor of Charlotte’s largest Catholic church backs parents
by Cristina Bolling
Frustrations that have been building among some Charlotte Catholic High parents over the school’s leadership and direction escalated last week, despite meetings designed to defuse parents’ concerns about transparency and the direction the school is heading.
It’s a situation that has divided members of the school’s community, with some parents going as far as to withdraw their students, and others remaining in support of the school’s administration and its leadership.
It has also received attention from leaders of the clergy, with the pastor of the largest parish in Charlotte speaking out during Mass on Sunday.
Some parents have been upset over what they call a transparency problem that came to light after an accreditation change made over the summer wasn’t communicated to families. And there have also been concerns that the curriculum is shifting to beef up the school’s Catholic identity in a way that has left some parents worried about other changes that may come in the future.
School administrators held both online and in-person meetings last week to discuss the issues with parents, and while some parents told The Ledger they were grateful for the communication, others said they’re still dissatisfied.
Some parents have seized on an administrator’s comment at a meeting last Monday that a goal of Catholic education is to “help our students get to heaven ultimately” and to “produce good husbands and wives,” and on the principal’s allusion that parents attending a Thursday meeting were part of a “culture problem.”
Charlotte Catholic, near the corner of Johnston Road and N.C. 51 in south Charlotte, is the largest religious school in the Charlotte area. It has about 1,250 students in grades 9-12 and is one of nine schools that is part of Mecklenburg Area Catholic Schools (MACS), which is overseen by the Diocese of Charlotte.
A change.org petition called “MACS Stakeholders Vote of No Confidence - Lori Phillips & Gregory Monroe” had more than 230 signatures as of Sunday evening, calling for a dismissal of the school’s principal and the Catholic school system’s superintendent.
“The lack of transparency, professionalism, and responsiveness to parental concerns jeopardizes the school’s integrity and the quality of education our children receive,” the petition reads.
The accreditation change moved Charlotte Catholic and other schools in Mecklenburg Area Catholic Schools from a widely known international Cognia accreditation to a new Catholic accreditation called Lumen, which is administered by The Catholic University of America.
On Sunday, Father John Allen, the acting pastor of St. Matthew Catholic Church, which is the largest church in the Charlotte diocese, told parishioners from the lectern that he has asked MACS officials “on many occasions” to pursue dual enrollment, and that he has asked that a school board made up of parents, teachers and clergy be “established immediately.”
Allen said he has heard from dozens of parents and teachers over the past 3 ½ weeks and that he has “raised my own voice with yours and have consistently and persistently made requests to the Catholic schools office that all our parents and teachers be heard and respectfully listened to.”
As of Sunday night, a video of Allen’s remarks on the St. Matthew Catholic Church Facebook page had more than 175 comments praising Allen’s remarks and more than 420 “like” or “love” reactions.
‘We missed the mark’: In statements to parents last month and in an online meeting held Monday night to address concerns from parents, Charlotte Catholic leaders apologized for not sharing the accreditation change with parents.
“We missed the mark, the administration did, by not informing you about our accreditation change, which took place July 1. I should have made you aware last spring as we were moving in that direction, and we certainly should have done that during the new school year,” former principal and current president Kurt Telford said during the Monday online meeting.
Contentious meeting: An in-person meeting with parents held Thursday on the campus of Charlotte Catholic became heated, one parent who attended told The Ledger, and a snippet of it became widely shared.
A short video clip from that meeting that made the rounds in text threads and on social media Friday shows Charlotte Catholic Principal Lori Phillips responding to an attendee’s comment about a “culture problem” leaving teachers feeling unappreciated.
“You said you’re telling the teachers that they’re loved, they’re appreciated, but they don’t feel that way. You can say that, but I can tell you, they do not feel that way. There’s a culture problem,” a speaker is heard saying in the video.
Phillips responded: “I agree with you. There is a culture problem.” She paused, then smiled and motioned to the room and said, “There’s a culture problem right here.” The comment was met with loud responses from parents, some of whom can be heard saying “whoa!” “what?” and “wow!”:
This 38-second video that was widely shared on Friday shows Charlotte Catholic Principal Lori Phillips in a meeting Thursday with parents at Charlotte Catholic High School. Phillips is in her second year as principal at Charlotte Catholic.
One parent who attended the meeting and asked to remain anonymous due to the potential for retaliation from other parents, said that the video has been taken out of context. She said the dialogue among parents that led up to the moment in the video was “very uncivil,” and that one man had what she characterized as “a tantrum.”
She added that she is “pleased with the administration and the direction of the school. … Most people I know feel similarly.”
Balancing academics and helping students ‘get to heaven’: In addition to concerns about accreditation, parents have been voicing concerns over curriculum changes such as a newly required philosophy course for 9th-graders and the elimination of an ancient world history course in 9th grade.
The school moved from requiring students to attend Mass during the school day once a month to having students attend once a week, which some parents told The Ledger they worry eats too much into instructional time.
Charlotte Catholic and school district officials have said they plan to keep the school academically rigorous and have said repeatedly that they have been assured that the change in accreditation won’t affect how college admissions officials view applicants from Charlotte Catholic.
In Monday’s online meeting, Phillips, Telford and MACS Superintendent Gregory Monroe answered questions about the reasoning behind the accreditation and curriculum changes and how the school balances its faith and curriculum components.
“You’re either going forward or backwards, and we are going forward, and we have to. We have to adapt to the time. Although keeping with our traditions of our Catholic faith and our mission is … to help our students get to heaven ultimately,” Phillips said in the online meeting.
She continued: “But how we do that? We educate them well. We educate them with the most rigorous and robust curriculum possible. And we want lawyers and doctors and teachers and engineers, but we also want them to be virtuous, and we want them to be good husbands and wives and citizens of the world.”
Parent choices: One parent who asked to remain anonymous to protect his relationships with people at the school said he withdrew his 11th-grader from Charlotte Catholic in the last couple of weeks and sent him to another private school in part because he sensed there is a shift at the school that is “definitely away from education into more of a church.”
He said he worried about weekly Mass taking away from class time and wondered why the new philosophy course is being added when students must already take required theology classes. He said he was concerned over the recent departures of two key teachers in the school’s science department and wondered if more staff would leave.
Some parents, however, told The Ledger that they are grateful for their kids to attend weekly Mass and that they trust the leadership of the school.
“At the end of the day, we’re a Catholic school. The Catholic faith is very important to me. It’s very important to our family. We make sacrifices to send our kids to Catholic school,” said Mary Catherine Surface, who has one student at Charlotte Catholic and three kids currently in the MACS system.
“The Catholic faith is the most important thing for us,” Surface said. “Flowing from that comes academics, extracurriculars and everything else. Putting God first, I think everything else is going to fall into line.”
Cristina Bolling is managing editor of The Ledger: cristina@cltledger.com.
Related Ledger articles:
“Parents demand clarity on Charlotte Catholic’s accreditation” (Jan. 10 🔒)
“Charlotte Catholic apologizes for not communicating accreditation change, but frustration remains” (Jan. 15 🔒)
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