I am angry.

The recent news that the community-based board of St. Dominic’s Regional High School will be unable to rescue its continued operation represents a huge loss for our entire state. Although I am not a St. Dom’s alumnus, I am a longtime admirer of the immense contribution it and its graduates have made over its many decades of operation in making this a better place.

The valiant efforts of the local board to sustain continued operations were frustrated at every turn by one person: James T. Ruggieri, the Roman Catholic bishop of the Diocese of Portland.

First, the bishop waited until March of this year to announce that St. Dom’s would permanently close in less than three months, giving our community precious little time to save it. The bishop blamed declining enrollment and operating losses. But the bishop had known since the prior September what this year’s enrollment, revenue and expenses were and the trend of that data over the last several years. What did the bishop suddenly learn in March that he didn’t know in September?

Second, the bishop made grossly unreasonable demands on community leaders who were determined to save the school. He demanded a $3 million escrow account be raised in less than a month in exchange for only one year of continued operation, an impossible ask. Alternatively, he then demanded rent of $20,000 per month, net of all operating expenses, to lease the school to the local board. Why the bishop felt it necessary to suddenly profit from leasing out the facility was never explained.

Third, the local board’s requests to meet face to face with the bishop and other representatives of the diocese were repeatedly rebuffed. This was a grave insult to our entire community and Catholic faithful everywhere. The local board was composed of some of our best and brightest, people such as Jonathan LaBonte and Marc Frenette. Yet, the bishop could not find the time to meet with them? The stakes were life or death to one of our most treasured institutions and the future of Catholic education in central Maine. Not important enough, apparently, to warrant a couple of hours of the bishop’s time.

Everyone here is entitled to question the bishop’s good faith. It appears apparent that he had no intention of working with our community to save St. Dom’s. The better question is: why?

The diocese had managed to run St. Dom’s into the ground. Needed maintenance was deferred, leaving the facility in poor repair and needing significant capital improvements. Declining enrollments were met with tuition increases, the opposite of what should have been done. An empty seat in a classroom produces zero revenue. The cost of filling that seat is negligible: all facilities and staff are already in place. Ours is a community of modest means. Increasing tuition guaranteed further enrollment losses. Tuition should have been reduced to fill those empty seats.

Incentives should have been offered to increase enrollment, such as sharply reduced tuition for first-year students. There was every reason to believe that, once entering students and their families experienced the quality of education that St. Dom’s delivered, that student would attend St. Dom’s through to graduation, assuring another three years of tuition revenue.

The marketing of a St. Dom’s education by the diocese was dreadful to nonexistent. St. Dom’s delivered a superior product at a time when our public schools continue to falter and the need for a quality education has never been greater. It should have been easy for competent administration to parlay those advantages into a sustainable economic model. The fact that the diocese could not do so demonstrates that its incompetent administration of St. Dom’s is the primary reason for its failure.

Perhaps that is why the bishop was so determined to thwart local efforts to save St. Dom’s. The bishop would have been humiliated had the local board succeeded in doing what the diocese could not. And while Bishop Ruggieri cannot be blamed for poor administration dating back years before his installation, he did nothing in his first year to rectify the situation. Instead, while not giving the local community any chance to save the school, he presides over its death.

That death was preventable. It’s a sad commentary on the condition of diocesan leadership that it succeeded in killing Catholic high school education in central Maine.