Peace Lutheran School: the Cleveland Road school of the WELS

1979–present · 16791 Cleveland Road

The Lutheran school on Cleveland Road is the oldest continuously operating private school on this ground: Peace Lutheran School, at 16791 Cleveland Road, is the school of Peace Lutheran Church, a Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod congregation that has served the South Bend–Mishawaka–Granger area since 1972, on the University of Notre Dame Campus Ministry's places-of-worship record. The school's own synodical federation — Southwest Michigan Lutheran Schools, the WELS federation the school belongs to — dates the school from 1979: "Since 1979, Peace Lutheran School has provided a Christ-centered education." In the fall of 2011 the school began its preschool, for children of three, four, and five, meeting Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings. The federation page carries the school's present tense as an elementary school with a preschool, and the Granger reference rosters of recent years carried it at kindergarten through grade 8.

Its present size must print at the strength of the federal return, which is small: the most recent NCES Private School Survey returns carried by the directories put Peace Lutheran's enrollment in the early grades only — fourteen students, pre-kindergarten through grade 3, in the 2026-27 profile — a contraction from the K-8 span the rosters carried, printed here as the directories give it rather than smoothed: a school founded in the subdivision decades' first years, still open on Cleveland Road in November 2026, at a fraction of the enrollment of the public elementaries around it. The Granger build's other Lutheran fact is a boundary one: the school feeds no Lutheran high school on this ground, and none is seated in the CDP.

Sources:

1. Southwest Michigan Lutheran Schools, "Peace Lutheran School, Granger," swmls.org (the school since 1979; the preschool begun fall 2011; the elementary school and preschool as the federation carries them), read November 2026.
2. University of Notre Dame Campus Ministry, places of worship (Peace Lutheran Church, WELS, 16791 Cleveland Road, Granger; serving the area since 1972).
3. NCES Private School Survey via PrivateSchoolReview, 2026-27 profile, and the NCES-sourced elementary directories (Peace Lutheran School, Granger: PreK-3, fourteen students in the current return; eight in another recent return — both printed in the entry's text as directory returns).