In addition to recruiting students for the Choice Scholarship Program, there are other ways in which to increase the student body. To attract an increase in enrollment, Noll would have to lower tuition, offer more scholarships to reduce tuition, offer transportation abroad, improve facilities–both educational and recreational–and advertise everything about the school. In lowering tuition, the opportunity of receiving a genuine Catholic education becomes more affordable during our nation’s current economic crisis, and thus available to people with a lower income. In order to do this, we can have the school stop paying for and renting out books to students, and have the students purchase them on their own similar to a college environment and similar to what Bishop Noll had done previously.
Through offering transportation to and from school we can make it easier on students and their parents and do such in different ways. For example, we can ask students to carpool to save money and go environmental, or bus students from wider areas to widen our student base. We can also create a monitored area with bike racks (students would assume risk of their own bikes, however) so that students from the local area could “go green” by riding a bike to school. Even allowing other methods like roller-blading and skateboarding could help produce this eco-friendly effect.
Further insuring a heightened increase in students would be to advertise. In order to advertise we could have students go out and spread information by word of mouth, place commercials on the television and radio, pass out and hang flyers, rent billboards, have more open houses and shadows, have internet advertising, send out more ambassadors to more middle schools, call houses, and send text messages and e-mails. Massive advertising like this across the entire region would give a more diverse range of students wanting to come to Bishop Noll.
Last but not least, to aid in our desire for more students would be to create a larger, more modern facility to house them. To do so, we would need to utilize all ninety-six classrooms on the campus, but to do that we need to renovate them for the higher standard of education and larger amount of students. To renovate the facility, we would need to take a loan out from both a bank and the Diocese of Gary. I imagine that due to Bishop Melczek’s desire to keep both Bishop Noll Institute and Andrean High School running at full capacity, he would approve of such a plan and thus a loan to support it. With that amount of money, we should bring all ninety-six classrooms up to code to house thirty students apiece.
All these ways to provide a large sum of students coming into Bishop Noll, along with an improved educational system would, of course, work over time.