Donors supporting Catholic schools have recently taken a more hands-on approach with their grantmaking, the New York Times reports.

In New York City, for example, Wall Street financier Charles B. Durkin, Jr. and a group of fellow benefactors used to visit Our Lady Queen of Angels School in East Harlem a few times a year to check on their investment — some $100,000 a year for the last fifteen years. Lately, however, Durkin has been initiating long meetings with principal Joanne Walsh and school officials and expressed interest in test scores and the progress made by students.

But while some commend the involvement of major donors with the city's Catholic schools, others express concern about donors' motives and tactics, which often favor consolidation and downsizing. "These are very strong-willed people, used to making decisions and used to having their way," said Catherine Hickey, former superintendent of the Archdiocese of New York, which is closing twenty-seven schools by the end of this academic year as a result of falling enrollments and rising deficits — a decision that was supported by donors. "At times, the decisions they wanted us to make were based on good business judgment, but not necessarily on sound educational principles."

In recent years, some of the tensions between donors and administrators have been defused by careful matchmaking. While most of the archdiocese's New York City schools receive scholarship money and other financing from a pool created by wealthy contributors, twenty-four of the schools participate in an adopt-a-school project designed to generate financial support for individual schools.

"The relationship between the church and its contributors used to be basically, 'Pray, pay, and obey — give us money, we'll take it from there,'" said Francis J. Butler, president of Foundations and Donors Interested in Catholic Activities, a national network of Catholic philanthropies. "But donors are much more proactive today. They are concerned about the quality of the schools, the leadership; they're drilling down into these problems."