The web as one story: who staffed Mishawaka's schools

1834–2011 · the staffing thread, told whole

Two foundings, one decade: The public and Catholic webs begin within ten years of each other and within a few streets. The subscription school of 1834 and the town superintendent of 1848 answer to the iron-works village's own ambition; the Catholic classes begin with Father Edward Sorin's Holy Cross missionaries in 1844 — the Religion section owns the mission — and settle into St. Joseph's vestry, then its 1864 brick schoolhouse. From the start the systems differ in one structural way that decides everything after: the public schools are staffed by whoever the town hires, and the Catholic schools are staffed by religious orders, whose labor is devoted, inexpensive and finite.

The orders' century: The Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ, in Mishawaka from 1878, carry the parish web's first great age — seven sisters teaching 350 pupils at St. Joseph's alone by 1907, on the diocesan history's count. The twentieth century layers the web: the public corporation builds its graded system and its 1924 high school under a superintendent, P. C. Emmons, whose name the elementary map may still carry; the Missionary Church plants its college in 1947, a denomination staffing its own school with its own presidents drawn from its own ministry; and in 1964 the diocese opens Marian, staffed — in Bishop Rhoades's words — almost completely by Salvatorian priests and brothers and religious sisters, on land the Franciscan sisters of the Dragoon Trail motherhouse gave. Every institution in this section except the public corporation was, at its founding, an order's or a church's work before it was a school's.

The thread runs out, and the web remakes itself: The modern turns of the web are the staffing thread working itself out. Queen of Peace School closes in 1970, the year its new church is dedicated, because the sisters can no longer staff it — and reopens in 1998 under a pastor's own rebuilding, lay-staffed, a grade a year. Marian passes from its religious founding staffs to diocesan administration across the Devliegher years and after. And in 2011 the three parish schools of the old web — St. Joseph's, St. Monica's, St. Bavo's — close as separate schools and reopen as one, Mishawaka Catholic School, their campuses kept and their staffs lay: the consolidation is usually told as an enrollment story, and the diocese's own account does cite low enrollments, but it is also the parish web's final adjustment to the end of the sisters' classroom century. The public web's parallel remaking is fiscal rather than religious — the defeated referendum of 2013 and the approved ones of 2016 and 2023 — and the boundary web's is geographic: a township trustee's new high school of 1958, built because the city's own school could no longer take the township's children. Told as one story, Mishawaka's schools are a single web of six systems, woven by the people who agreed to staff them.

Sources:

1. The records of the institutions as cited in their own entries below; the Religion section for the congregations (Holy Cross mission of 1844; the Poor Handmaids' arrival, 1878; the motherhouse, 1943).