Lessons of St. Alexander's closing

The closing of St Alexander's Catholic school in Villa Park should be a wake-up call that inflation has been creeping up on us slowly but surely. My generation was attending Catholic grammar schools during the tail end of the Great Depression.

The tuition was $1 per month, and many families struggled to come up with that amount. A big factor in rising costs for Catholic schools has been the ever-declining number of nuns who once taught for free and the labor of love. Replacing them with lay teachers is another big factor in tuition pricing out at $4,000-plus per student.

And replacing our once-prudent, pre-World War II lifestyle with the postwar materialism we replaced it with didn't help us, as both parents had to go to work to satisfy that style. Obviously, this resulted in much smaller families... and fewer students.

Walter Santi

Bloomingdale