If you have a relative or friend with close ties to Sacred Heart School in Erie, Pa., you probably know how hard these last two days have been. The announcement that Sacred Heart, one of the city's oldest and best-known Catholic grade schools, will close at the end of the school year is big news in this region.

It's not shocking news -- parishioners have been working hard for years to keep their school open, but enrollment continued to slip. As population trends in Erie keep shifting, close-knit ethnic neighborhoods are quickly becoming a thing of the past. Sacred Heart is only the latest victim of this trend, but there are certain to be many more in the years ahead.

Former City Councilman Bob Brabender, who grew up at Sacred Heart School, was telling me what the classes were like when he was there in the 1930s. "The school was bursting at the seems," Brabender said. "It was two kids to a seat."

Of course, Catholic schools were a tremendous deal for growing families back then. Staffed almost exclusively by nuns, expenses were low and tuition was affordable for virtually everyone. "Plus, Sacred Heart was right smack in the middle of three social clubs -- the Sacred Heart Ushers Club, the Knights of St. John and the Eye Club," Brabender said. "Those clubs helped out the parish in so many ways."

I called Brabender to pick his brain about all the great athletes who passed through Sacred Heart School through the years. He rattled off dozens of names -- and that was only through the 1940's. Brabender praised the hard work of a young parish priest named Father Francis Kaltenbach, who passed his love of athletics down to the kids. Listening to Brabender, I was struck by how much the scene he described sounded like something out of "Going My Way."

Catholic school enrollment in Erie remained strong through the 1970's, but rising costs and the shift of many families to the suburbs made maintaining the schools a much greater burden for inner-city parishes.

This has not been an easy story for the Erie Times-News to cover, because it's such an intensely personal one for so many of the people involved. I grew up at St. John the Baptist Praish and still have many friends there, even though we are now members of St. George Parish. Some of my boyhood pals tease me that I've sold out and moved to the west side. On some levels they really aren't kidding, and I must admit to feeling a certain degree of guilt. Hey, what's the point of being Catholic if you don't feel guilty about something?

Mostly, I feel sad that a lifestyle that was so familiar and worked so well for my family and so many others seems to be quickly slipping away. That's the story we should be telling in the newspaper. But, as I say, it's not easy because the grief is real and few people want to open up.

It's also disappointing to me, as a Catholic, that my church leaders always tend to circle the wagons at times like this. They stress secrecy when what people need is to bring it all out in the sunshine and talk everything out. I don't want to get into my gripes with church policy -- my wife is already irked with me because our pastor occasionally reams me out from the altar because he doesn't like the editorial cartoons I approve for the Times-News. But everyone could benefit from a little openness.

The closing of so many schools and the changes in so many of Erie's neighborhoods is an important development for everyone who lives in this region.

I feel sorry for the students at Sacred Heart who will have to move to another school in September. On the other hand, they at least got a taste of what was, for me anyway, a wonderful experience in my youth. As Father O'Malley (played by Bing Crosby) said in "The Bells of St. Mary," those kids will take a bit of their old school with them wherever they go.

-- Kevin Cuneo