By James Windell
“When I heard the school was closing, I cried,” says Lois Brigham, the St. Basil School Board President. “There were a lot of factors that went into it, but I wish it were not happening.”
Brigham, who was also a teacher at the school, was not the only person shocked and stunned by the announcement that the school was closing at the end of this school year in June. Others who worked for the school expressed dismay at the circumstances that led to the decision to close.
One school employee who requested that her name not be used said she was heartbroken about the decision to shut its doors after 75 years. “A lot of tears have been shed and continue to be shed,” she said.
Other people who were former teachers or students expressed their sadness. And more than a dozen former teachers and students acknowledged that St. Basil Catholic School was an “incredible school” that provided an excellent education.
Vickiy Kozlik Wall, a South Haven resident, said it makes her heart sad that the school is closing. “My mother was a graduate from St. Basil,” Wall said. “Then my parents put all four of us kids through St. Basil.”
Reminiscing about her years at St. Basil, Wall said that the teachers were mostly nuns when she attended school and they were very strict. She recalled incidents when the nuns applied physical punishment to maintain order in the classroom. Nonetheless, she says she received an outstanding education.
“Our classrooms were smaller and we learned,” she said. “We were too scared to act up.”
She also said that her parents and the parents of her friends “were paying for the best education.” If she or her friends, Wall said, came home from school crying about something, the standard parental response was: “We’re paying for you to receive the best education.”
Wall says that when she and her friends left St. Basil to go to public school, “We were smarter when we got to high school.”
Brigham, who taught at St. Basil for over 30 years, also can attest to the extraordinary education she and other teachers helped students obtain. “It was a wonderful school,” Brigham said. “I heard from quite a few of my former students who became lawyers, doctors and teachers. Our former graduates would often show up in the top 10 in South Haven High School’s graduating classes. I also know students did well in high school because I would often hear that from high school teachers.”
That the school turned out well-educated students is beyond dispute. Those students have gone on to professional careers, government positions and even come back as teachers at St. Basil – as did Lois Brigham. For nearly 75 years, St. Basil Catholic School was a proud institution that was an important South Haven area institution.
So, how does a venerable institution come to lose its way?
Several people who have been associated with the school, including the current principal, declined to speak about what went wrong while at the same time acknowledging that enrollment declined significantly in the past year. Neither present employees of the school, members of the St. Basil School Board nor the diocese could offer any substantial insight as to why the school went from its lofty status as a school that flourished to a school beset by financial problems, unable to keep going.
However, interviews with several parents of recent students revealed ongoing problems at the school leading to dozens of parents withdrawing their children and refusing to enroll them for the 2025-2026 school term.
Those parents, some of whom did not want to speak on the record, tell a story that is consistent and reflects their concern about the safety of their children as well as having serious doubt about their kids receiving a quality education. The story these parents tell indicate that problems began under the leadership of principal Camille DeLano, who became St. Basil principal in 2017. However, as one parent put it, Father Evelio Ramirez, who is the pastor of St. Basil Catholic Church, blamed parents for pulling their children from the school. “But he has no one to blame but himself for allowing the administration to create the environment that forced us to leave,” a parent who had two children in the school said.
The litany of problems, according to the parents who were interviewed, began a couple of years ago.
“Our primary reason for removing our children was the administration of the school,” said a parent who preferred to be anonymous. “It was Principal Camille Delano, Fr. Richard Altine (the previous priest), Fr. Evelio (our current priest), and Fr. Evelio’s assistant, Rick Hardy who are the four main characters.”
The three primary issues according to the parents who were interviewed were: 1.) the lack of a curriculum; 2.) severe discipline problems that were not adequately addressed; and 3.) financial mismanagement.
The financial mismanagement, parents said, had to do with the school administration allowing greater numbers of students to attend free. Here’s the way one parent put it: “Fr. Richard Altine made it seem that there was a big scholarship fund that covered this expense. There is no such scholarship fund. They drained the church and the endowment fund and relied on the Booster Club to hold fundraisers to make ends meet. The administrative assistant that they hired had no clue how much tuition anyone had paid during the year.”
Some of the parents who no longer sent their children to St. Basil were unhappy about Principal DeLano’s handling of academics. One parent explained it this way: “Delano refused to let us see test scores and never defined what they were actually teaching our children. When my older child left the school, we found her to be significantly behind her public school peers, especially in math, science, and social studies.”
Other children, parents said, had to attend summer school classes in order to catch up with their peers. Or, in some situations, parents hired tutors because their children were behind others in reading. A mother of a former student said: “The staff at Lincoln Elementary told me that every single child from Saint Basil was behind in reading and they all had the same problems with phonics.”
The third, and perhaps the most worrisome concern, was the increasing discipline problems in the classrooms. A parent said in a recent interview: “One student in my daughter’s 5th grade class punched a teacher in the face without any punishment. When I asked Mrs. Delano about the incident, she told me that this student had a bad morning, and I didn’t understand. This same student also beat another child with his boot, poked someone in the eye with his pencil, and got into regular fist fights. Another student in her class barricaded himself in their classroom and it took five adults and finally a police officer to remove him. Our students were forced to sit in the hallway while all of this played out. The police also had to speak to the middle school boys because of the bullying and sexual harassment that was happening, again without consequences.”
Other parents reported that their children were being bullied and the school did not stop the bullying. “Our children were not safe,” a parent said.
One of the situations that parents said played into the discipline problems was that DeLano was the primary teacher for a 5th-6th split classroom while also trying to fulfill her job as principal. “She made this decision unilaterally and this poor choice left her unable to do either role well,” a parent commented.
Then, to compound already existing problems, parents complained that Delano began hiring parents who were unqualified to be teachers. “They certainly did not have classroom control,” a parent said. “It made no sense to me to pay for someone’s parent to try to teach my children when they can go to a public school for free and have an actual certified teacher.”
A parent who had two children in the school for several years said that she was deeply committed to a Catholic education. She had attended a Catholic school, and she wanted her children to receive a Catholic education as well. She and her husband chose St. Basil because it had a long tradition of providing a great education. Things went fine for several years until the 2022-2023 school year. “My children started coming home and telling me about behavior problems in their classrooms,” she said. “That raised a red flag for me.”
After she heard about several volent classroom incidents, she finally approached the principal in January, 2024. And then she and other parents asked for a meeting of parents and the school administration on February 5, 2024. “That meeting was a complete disaster.”
Several people who were at that meeting described it with one mother saying: “That was the big meeting where everything kind of exploded. They brought in Rick Hardy, whom we had never met. And we were not allowed to speak. We were told that we were going to write phrases on note cards and put those up on the board, which was really stupid.”
The parents complied, though, and the three issues came up over and over: Discipline problems, the curriculum and finances.
At one point, Fr. Richard stood up in the back of the room and went on a “tirade about how everything we said was a lie, the budget was under control, and the reason we were not happy was because we didn’t want brown children coming to this school.”
That, more than one parent has asserted, was not true. “They tried to make it into a White versus Hispanic thing and that was not it. Both White and Hispanic kids had discipline problems.”
Parents described sending many letters, exchanging multiple emails with the school and the parish and having two more meetings. Although parents said they believed the school administration acted defensively, they did not acknowledge there were problems. The Superintendent of Schools, Margaret Erich, from the diocese, attended at least one meeting and while parents said she made a polite response and thanked parents for bringing the concerns to her attention, “They didn’t actually do anything.” Others say that DeLano made “weak” attempts to make changes, but discipline was not enforced.
By late 2024 and early 2025, parents were withdrawing their children citing safety concerns. If it had been just a few parents who removed their children from St. Basil, it might have been dismissed as a temporary aberration. However, as one parent, who withdrew both of her children stated, “When 90 parents withdraw their kids, you know something is seriously wrong.”
Even a School Board member, Sean Russell withdrew his children.
One parent put it this way in an interview: “People have been hurt by this and they are not willing to be quoted by name because this is a small town and they don’t want to deal with any backlash. But underneath their anger is sadness.”
James Gagnon, a South Haven parent who removed his child from the school, wanted to share his outlook on the unfortunate situation. “St. Basil offered a fantastic experience to our daughter when she first attended in the fall of 2022,” he said. “Unfortunately, conditions deteriorated quickly and became so concerning and toxic that we had no other option than to pull our daughter in the middle of the 2023-24 school year.
“I attempted to work with school leadership, like so many other parents. I shared my concerns and gave them the opportunity to improve, but they were not interested and did not take the issues seriously.”
But like Gagnon who is committed to a Catholic education, one mother of two children views it as a sad commentary on an unresponsive school administration. But she says there is a lesson to be learned. “I hope that ultimately the people who are responsible for all of this instead of just shuffling people around, that they actually acknowledge their mistakes and not just go to another parish and make them again.”
