AS SHE STRUGGLED toward a pivotal decision about sending her daughter to a parochial school, memories of her own Catholic school childhood lurked in Lynn Kennedy's mind.

At the time, 1989, Lynn and her husband, Michael, were not very active Catholics. But Michael felt it was time for a change for their oldest daughter, Morgan. She was in pre-kindergarten at a Quaker school, and he wanted to enroll her in St. Brigid's in Westbury. But Lynn had formed some negative images about Catholic school as a child in Peekskill.

"I definitely felt that I did not get the math and science background that I needed, but at the same time I had such a wonderful time then, in some ways," Lynn said. "I learned to love literature, and I learned to love writing in Catholic school." Her love of literature led to a career as a high school English teacher, but her schooling had another side. "There were a few teachers -- very few, when I think of the whole spectrum of teachers I had -- who loomed in my memory as being cruel, uneducated and very frightening."

This was on her mind as she checked out the building. "I looked at the school, and it looked Fifties," she said. "So what I did was I walked into the school and didn't announce myself and started sort of snooping around. I wanted to see whether there were cheerful pictures on the wall that reflected a happy population. I wanted to see whether the rows were neat, and therefore the teachers would be too rigid. I wanted a mingling of chaos and order."

Later, Lynn asked some probing questions of the principal, Sister Carlann Buscemi. "She looked at me very deeply and she said, `You're looking for something for yourself, aren't you?' " Lynn recalled. "She was right, and as I grew to know her, she encouraged me very much on my own personal journey, and I'll always love her for that."

That journey has been shaped by the decision to enroll first Morgan and then her younger sister, Sarah, in St. Brigid's. The school converted both parents from skeptics about Catholic education to high-profile players in the struggle to save the school's life -- Michael as a former president of the school board and now leader of the bingo operation that raises $20,000 to $30,000 a year for the school, and Lynn as the vice president of the Parents Association. It also enlivened their faith. "Our children really brought us back to the church," Michael said.

Andrew and Eileen Simons also wrestled with the decision to send a child to St. Brigid's, even though their two older children had already gone there and done well. Michael had graduated from the eighth grade at St. Brigid's in 1978, went on to Chaminade High School in Mineola, the College of the Holy Cross and Harvard Law School. Katie had graduated from St. Brigid's in 1983, went on to Sacred Heart Academy in Hempstead and was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. While they were at St. Brigid's, their parents were very involved. Andrew, an attorney, served as president of the Parents Association and, at another time, as president of the school board. So did Eileen, who teaches math education at Hofstra.

But from Katie's graduation in 1983 until young Andrew was ready to start in 1986, the Simonses had not been as active in the school, and they were hearing rumors it had declined. "I asked around to a lot of people: `What do you think?' There was not a great deal of enthusiasm," Eileen said. But her own observations convinced her that it was sound educationally. It also had something they couldn't find in their public school district -- diversity.

"The atmosphere in the school is what we wanted," Eileen said. Though the East Meadow school district has become more diverse in recent years, she said, at the time of their decision on Andrew, it was virtually all white. "That's not the reality of the world." In Andrew's reading group at St. Brigid's, however, there were children of several ethnic groups, all doing very well. His parents liked the lesson: Ethnicity has nothing to do with talent.

But in an era already marked by increasing tuition, that atmosphere wasn't attractive to enough other parents. "The enrollment went down every year from 1977 until 1993," Eileen said. The question for her was: "Is the school going to be there long enough for him to graduate? I had to answer: I don't know. I'm not sure."

So they threw themselves into the survival struggle. When parents had to raise large amounts to plug the budget hole, Eileen led the fund-raising. When the school became a regional school with Our Lady of Hope parish last September -- a key step in the fiscal salvation of the school -- Andrew agreed to be on the regional school board. The past few years have been a turbulent time. "We almost went out of business," he said.

For now, with the funding situation improved as a result of the regionalization, times are calmer. St. Brigid's has the qualities that attract parents to Catholic schools: educational excellence in a caring, value-laden environment. But it faces the same problems that have troubled Catholic schools for 30 years: rising tuitions that depress enrollments, plus inability to pay teachers salaries competitive with public schools. On top of that, it has the challenge of being a proudly multicultural school that finds it hard to attract students from mostly white areas nearby. Now, there are new signs of hope: more financial stability and increased enrollment in the past two school years, to a current total of 435, at the same time as Catholic school enrollment is increasing nationally as a result of a new push by Catholic leaders and an aggressive marketing campaign.

Over its first half century the school grew steadily. It opened in 1918, with 150 children and five nuns from the School Sisters of Notre Dame. To accommodate increasing enrollment, the parish opened a new building on Maple Avenue in 1955 with 934 children. Within a decade, enrollments soared to 1,600, and in 1965 the parish opened a 14-classroom addition and a new convent. That was the zenith for St. Brigid's, right after national Catholic elementary and secondary enrollment peaked at 5.5 million in 1964.

Soon after, new religious vocations dwindled and thousands left the convents, cutting the number of nuns by 74,000 in three decades. Many nuns left teaching for other ministries. Catholic schools had to hire more lay teachers, at salaries well above the stipends of the nuns they replaced (though below public school wages). With the increased costs, schools could no longer rely solely on the traditional source of revenue, Sunday church collections. Tuitions rose, and enrollments fell almost constantly until the increases of the past three years. Elementary and secondary enrollment is now 2.6 million.

On top of these national factors, St. Brigid's faced another overwhelming reality in the 1980s: a wave of Central American refugees -- mostly from El Salvador. Many could not afford the tuition. The pastor, the Rev. Fred Schaefer, had put together a scholarship fund - starting with $10,000 left in a will by one of his priests, the Rev. Basil Ellard -- and used it to help refugee families. "So they weren't being carried by the other children," Schaefer said.

Despite that, some parents saw the refugees as a financial drain, and some worried that their language problems would take teaching time away from other children, even though the school had a staffer to teach English as a second language. But the parish did not flinch. "We felt we were carrying out the gospel message in doing this," said Sister Marie Patrick McDermott, who came to St. Brigid's in 1980. "I think it caused some of the people to take their children out of school and, I think, to get very upset with Fred."

It is not clear how much of the enrollment loss was attributable to this gospel commitment to the poor, and how much to tuition increases. But tuition did increase. It was $500 when Sister Carlann became principal in 1984. This fall it will be $1,500 for each in-parish child, kindergarten through eighth grade, and $2,195 for each out-of-parish child. There are reduced rates for families that send more than one child and slightly different rates in nursery and pre-kindergarten. And enrollment did go down during Sister Carlann's seven years as principal. "It continuously declined, roughly by about forty each year," she said.

In the '80s, the school hired a full-time computer teacher, started a nursery school and pre-kindergarten program and expanded its kindergarten to a full day -- making it a nursery-through-eighth-grade school. But enrollment losses spawned annual rumors of closing. "I've heard it since I started here," said Kathleen Battistini, a teacher recruited by Sister Carlann eight years ago to start the pre-kindergarten.

In addition to the school's problems, in 1988 the parish took a hard financial hit. As St. Brigid's kept growing, Schaefer had suggested it be divided into two parishes. The diocese agreed and chose Ellison Avenue as the border. That put a relatively well-to-do area of homes in the new parish, Our Lady of Hope, based in a Carle Place chapel that St. Brigid's had run as a mission since 1938. When most of those families began contributing to the new parish, revenue from collections at St. Brigid's dropped sharply.

"Worse than the finances, in my estimation, it drew the color line," Schaefer said, "and it affirmed Carle Place as being lily-white forever and a day."

In 1989 Schaefer left and Msgr. Francis X. Gaeta became pastor, and he had to make debt reduction a priority. One step was to lease the mostly empty convent to the Nassau County Police Department for office space. Four nuns moved to a house owned by the parish, and two retired to the motherhouse. The lease was painful, but it brought in revenue. "It was a logical move," Sister Carlann said.

The next decision meant more pain. The school board members liked Sister Carlann, but they felt they needed a new principal to turn around enrollment losses. "It was a consensus," said Michael Kennedy, then board president. But in his own home it was a controversial decision. His wife Lynn had grown very close to Sister Carlann. "The only way we ever survived at that time is we agreed not to talk about it," Lynn said, "because I disagreed very strongly."

On the first school day of 1991, Gaeta showed up at the school, looking uneasy and asking to speak with Sister Carlann. "He called me a holy person, a wonderful person, a prayerful person. I kept waiting for the punchline," she recalled. "He was wonderful about the whole thing - very gentlemanly, very nervous." The message still hurt: At the end of the school year, the parish would have a new principal.

Gaeta called it one of the most difficult things he has ever done. "She really was just a beautiful, beautiful lady, a very compassionate heart," he said. "But I just felt that she didn't have what was needed for basically a crisis kind of a time." He also replaced the leaders of the religious education program, Patricia McDonough and Sister Barbara Schwarz.

To succeed Sister Carlann, Gaeta and the school board chose Christine Lombardi, who had been an assistant superintendent in Port Jefferson for 25 years and retired when the district began to downsize. They liked her educational knowledge. "She already knew what the cutting edge of research was," said Eileen Simons, a teacher of teachers. Though Lombardi is Catholic, she did not attend or work in Catholic schools, but she has a spirituality of her own.

"Having been in the public system, you realize how much of gospel values and values in general are missing," she said. "I really feel that this is ministry here, and that I've been called by God to do this, because there were circumstances in my life that led to a deepening of my faith."

She believes in the injunction in the teacher's handbook to "teach as Jesus taught," but she has also focused on updating the curriculum and keeping teaching standards high. She asked some teachers to leave, and some left on their own. "Three-quarters of the staff is basically new."

The other reality the school had to face was tight finances. It couldn't raise tuition too high without further eroding enrollment, and the new pastor couldn't increase the parish's subsidy to the school without shortchanging other parish needs. So Gaeta set an annual ceiling of $215,000 on the subsidy. To fill the gap, the parents would have to raise $90,000 a year.

"What Father Frank did was he threw down the challenge: `How much do you want the school?' " Eileen Simons said. Parents wanted it enough to do almost constant fund-raising in 1992-93 and 1993-94. "Eileen was our commander-in-chief at the time," said Nancy Silvestro, whose twin sons Bryan and Scott sold their share of chocolate and wrapping paper to fill the gap. "There was just one event right after another."

Not all parents were happy. Some grumbled about the fund drives, because they already pay tuition. "It's just part of the Catholic school experience," said Paul Clagnaz, who sees the issue from both sides, as a parent and as a teacher and assistant principal at the school. With improving finances, this year's goal was only $50,000. "The resentment has diminished, because the number of fund-raising activities has diminished," said Luis Navia, the outgoing president of the Parents Association.

The reason for the financial improvement was regionalization. "We had to regionalize," Lombardi said. "Otherwise, we were going to close." Knowing that many parishes could no longer afford their own schools, the Diocese of Rockville Centre in 1990 set up 27 regions, in which several parishes could combine resources to run a regional school.

St. Brigid's was in a region with Our Lady of Hope, St. Aidan's in Williston Park and Corpus Christi in Mineola. Since Our Lady of Hope had no school of its own, it had to give a share of its collections - eventually 15 percent -- to the three parishes with schools. Then the diocese agreed to a plan that would create a new St. Brigid / Our Lady of Hope Regional School in the Westbury uilding, allow St. Aidan's and Corpus Christi to keep running their parish schools, and permit Our Lady of Hope to give its entire subsidy, nearly $65,000 a year, to St. Brigid's. That helped St. Brigid's financially and didn't cause real pain, as plans in some regions had. "There was no closing of any school," Clagnaz said. "There was no loss of staff."

The regionalization also helped win a three-year, $100,000-a-year diocesan grant for St. Brigid's. (Despite the school's jaw-breaking new official name, most people still use the old one.) To get the grant, schools must have a legitimate deficit, must be regionalized and must have a minority population of more than 40 percent. In effect, the school's diversity has saved it and become its guiding spirit. Teachers, parents and students see that spirit in the way the children get along, without racial or ethnic division.

"To me, this school represents the world, the United Nations," said Idali Arnes, who has four children in St. Brigid's. The students notice diversity, she said, but positively. "They're aware of it in its beauty," she said. "I think it excites them and intrigues them and makes them more tolerant."

The students agree. "They try to bring everybody together -- not just teaching math, one plus one," Morgan Kennedy said. One of those who graduated on Saturday, Andrew Simons, said, "It really depends what kind of tastes you have, who you hang out with. It's mixed that way, not by race." Two of his classmates are Scott and Bryan Silvestro. "When I see my friends I don't really see their race; I just see my friends," Scott said. "It makes you color-blind," Bryan added. "You just see what's inside a person."

But Navia and others believe the diversity also causes some parents to choose other schools. "There are sometimes white parents who come, take a look at the school and say, `Thank you, no,' " Navia said.

Even though it is a two-parish school, for example, it has few students from Our Lady of Hope. Parents there send children to St. Brigid's for pre-kindergarten and nursery, which the Carle Place public schools don't have, but they don't keep them in the school later. "Carle Place is lily-white," said Sister Carlann, who now teaches at Our Lady of Victory in Floral Park. "They don't want to send their kids to this multicultural school. I openly spoke at school board meetings of racism." Gaeta agreed. "That is definitely a big part of it," he said. "But there's also another big factor, that the Carle Place schools are excellent."

The quality of the Carle Place schools, plus finances, were the key factors for JoAnn Moreno, one of two lay representatives from Our Lady of Hope on the regional board, who sent three children to the public schools and not St. Brigid's. "I would not have been able to afford the tuition," she said.

When Donna Fitzgerald came to St. Brigid's as a teacher in 1990, she was hesitant about teaching in Catholic school. But the diversity has helped bond her to St. Brigid's. "To me, this is what school desegregation was supposed to lead to," she said. "It's very hard to explain to people who are not here how important it is." As assistant principal, Clagnaz often speaks with parents who have opted against St. Brigid's. "I think that if people would just come in and take a look, it would serve them so well, because the kids get along beautifully," he said.

In fact, Jennifer Gallagher, a music and math teacher, said that teaching children to love one another is the whole point: "I think that's the mission of Catholic education. It isn't better discipline anymore. It isn't better education." Though the school does have a code of conduct, the ruler-swinging nun image does not fit. "I tell parents very clearly, if they're coming to this school because in their minds is the old, traditional Catholic school discipline, they're not going to find that," Lombardi said.

She also has to face stereotyping of teachers. "People are under the impression that we have uncertified people, just warm bodies in the classroom," Lombardi said. That isn't true, but even Donna Fitzgerald remembers having that impression before she arrived. "I expected to walk into a school with people who couldn't find jobs anyplace else," she said. "That's not what I walked into."

In fact, parents who are professional educators applaud the educational quality. "My children have had teachers whom I consider to be master teachers," Lynn Kennedy said. "I would want to student-teach under Sister Marie Patrick," the last remaining nun teaching in the school. Consistently, Lombardi said, 100 percent of the students score above the state reference point on program evaluation tests of reading, math, writing and social studies.

Navia, dean of the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences at New York Institute of Technology, is also an evaluator for the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools, an accrediting agency. He hopes to see St. Brigid's apply for and win accreditation, which not even all public schools have achieved. "If Middle States were to come to St. Brigid's, they would be very impressed," he said. They might want better computer education, but he said that is solvable. "The most critical thing is the spirit, the commitment, the enthusiasm. It is here."

Nationally, a federal study showed that Catholic school students spent more time on computers than those in public schools, said Robert Kealey, executive director of the Department of Elementary Schools at the National Catholic Educational Association. In the most recent federally sponsored National Assessment of Educational Progress, Kealey added, Catholic school students scored higher than public school students in the fourth and eighth grades.

"The Catholic schools in the past didn't have to be competitive educationally; today they do," said Eileen Finn, a former St. Brigid's teacher, whose parents never had any doubt that they'd send her to Catholic school. "I don't think anyone today, at the prices the Catholic schools charge, could say that."

Finn is an example of one area in which Catholic schools cannot compete: salary. The starting pay in the diocese for 1995-96 is $14,558, and the top pay after 28 years of experience is $38,625. As a single parent with four children, Finn decided, after her separation from her husband, to go into teaching. But when she finished her master's degree at Queens College in 1991, she could not find work in public schools. So she accepted a job at St. Brigid's. "I wouldn't have thought of working for that kind of money unless I had to," Finn said.

Like other good teachers who can't find work in public schools and take jobs for less pay in Catholic schools, Finn ended up loving it. But last year, out of the blue, she was offered a New York City public-school job. Her salary at St. Brigid's was just under $19,000, and she would start in the city at about $32,000, with a chance for considerable overtime. Still, it was tough for her to leave St. Brigid's. She had an emotional discussion with Lombardi, an advocate of better teacher pay, who understood why Finn had decided to leave. "We both cried," Finn said.

Finn's son, Jimmy, has been accepted at a Catholic high school, Chaminade, and they can now afford to think about it. "If I was still teaching in Catholic school," she said, "my son couldn't [afford to] go to one." But she misses St. Brigid's, where she had state-of-the-art books and the freedom to teach, rather than worry about discipline. In public school in Far Rockaway, she has neither.

On Catholic-school pay, it is difficult for single people to live. Donna Fitzgerald, who lives with her parents, manages. Her friend, Donna Krauss, lives alone. She lost her job at St. Anne's in Brentwood when the school closed in a regionalization in 1993, then found work at St. Brigid's. But she has to supplement her $15,000 teaching salary by waitressing. "I make sure I work at a restaurant that's not anywhere near here," she said.

"The teachers who are involved in Catholic education see it as ministry, because they cannot survive on this pay," Lombardi said. That ministry teaches values, starting early. "We don't have any religion textbooks, but we live our religion every day," said Kathy Battistini, one of two pre-kindergarten teachers. The children pray before snack, they learn not to fight and at Christmas they get to put hay in the manger if they've done a good deed. "We talk about Jesus and the love of Jesus."

The lessons take hold early. Lynn Kennedy remembers Morgan's insisting in first grade that she wanted to give her piggy bank to the poor. Morgan made Lynn take her to the rectory, where Morgan presented it directly to Gaeta. Nor have the school's values been lost on Sarah, a charming, friendly child who often tells Lynn: "Sister Marie Patrick is close to Jesus."

About 25 percent of the students are non-Catholic. Lombardi explains to the parents that the school imparts Catholic values, and that non-Catholic children learn religion with the others. It has not been a problem. "To teach them to be good Christians is to teach them to be good people," Fitzgerald said.

For all that, the school is still not out of the woods. This spring, projected enrollment for the fall dropped below expectations, and Lombardi had to delay for weeks giving letters of intent -- promises of employment -- to some teachers. The school's diocesan grant expires after the 1996-97 school year, and there is no guarantee that they can get it extended indefinitely. There is also no way of knowing how enrollment will be affected by two changes next fall: a 5 percent tuition increase and a $200 "participation fee." Parents pay at the start of the year and get back all or part of it, based on how much they volunteer.

But the parents and teachers remain optimistic that the worst of the school's travails are behind it. Sister Joanne Callahan, the diocesan schools superintendent, is also hopeful. "I do think they're going to make it," she said. "St. Brigid's is a wonderful school and should be saved."