The Town's Own School: From the Collegiate Institute to New Carlisle High School

NEW CARLISLE · THE INSTITUTE BUILDING TO 1968 · THE HIGH SCHOOL'S COURSE

The school the town bought in the old college building became New Carlisle's graded school and then its high school. The yearbook record fixes the high school's span at its near end: New Carlisle High School yearbooks run from 1950 to 1968 in the county school-records index, and the school was graduating seniors through the 1950s in the ordinary way — Bill Doba, later a college football coach, graduated from New Carlisle High School in 1958. A New Prairie Junior High yearbook for 1969 shows the ladder already rebuilt the year the combined high school opened.

The old high school building in town did not close when the high school left it. A South Bend Tribune column of November 1, 2026, written around a 1971 Jaycees fundraiser at which Dolly Parton sang, states the afterlife plainly: "The middle school was New Carlisle High School until New Prairie High opened in the late 1960s." The in-town building thus passed from high school to middle school — the standard Indiana conversion of the consolidation era — and served the town's middle grades on its town site while the new high school rose on Cougar Road north of town. When the middle school in its turn left the building for the Cougar Road campus, and what became of the town building afterward, the record reached for this section does not say; both questions are carried in the closing gaps.

Sources:

1. LDS Genealogy, St. Joseph County school-records (yearbook) index — New Carlisle High School yearbooks 1950–1968; New Prairie High School yearbooks from 1969; New Prairie Junior High yearbook 1969.
2. South Bend Tribune, November 1, 2026 — the middle school's occupancy of the former New Carlisle High School building.
3. Bill Doba biographical record — New Carlisle High School, class of 1958.