Granger Schools: Two School Corporations, a Parish School and the Township Schools Before Them

Schools · Two Corporations, a Parish School, and the Township Century Beneath Them

Granger has no school district of its own, because Granger has no government of its own: the place is schooled the way it is governed, by units drawn on other maps. Two public corporations divide the ground. Penn-Harris-Madison, named for the three eastern townships it was reorganized from in the early 1960s, serves the Harris Township body of the place and seats five schools inside the census line — Mary Frank Elementary, Prairie Vista Elementary, Horizon Elementary, Northpoint Elementary, and Discovery Middle School. The South Bend Community School Corporation serves the western, Clay Township portion, but seats no building inside the line; its Granger children ride to schools in South Bend. A parish school, St. Pius X Catholic School, opened in 2008 as the first newly built kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school in its diocese in more than four decades. Around those poles stands a small independent strand — a Lutheran school on Cleveland Road, a chapel school on Fir Road, a homeschool academy, and, until the summer of 2026, a PreK-12 Christian school on Gumwood Road that had stood since 1972. Beneath all of it lies a full township-school century: log schoolhouses, numbered districts under township trustees, and two township buildings — the Harris School of 1928 and the Mary Frank School of 1958 — of which the second still teaches children today. this section tells the schools of this ground whole, school by school, at the size the record gives each, with the current state dated as of November 2026.

The banked Schools file carries the Penn-Harris-Madison corporation whole — its 1962–63 formation, its fifteen schools, its present form — but its superintendent succession stood settled only for its last two holders, Dr. Jerry Thacker (2006–2025) and Dr. Heather Short (from 1 July 2025), with the forty-three years from the founding to 2006 unnamed. This addendum digs that line from the records that fix office-holders by date: the Indiana State Board of Accounts' audit schedules of officials, which name each superintendent with term dates; the district's own releases; and the press and professional record around them. The line is carried whole from 1971 to the current holder. Two segments resisted every open source reached — the corporation's first superintendent and the years between Dr. Speicher's long tenure and Dr. Markavitch's — and they are printed as named gaps inside the succession, with the records that will settle them, rather than smoothed over.