Saint Joseph High School — the Consolidated School

Classes began September 20, 1953 — 1441 North Michigan Street — removed to 453 North Notre Dame Avenue, 2012

The founding: Saint Joseph High School began classes on September 20, 1953, the product of the merger of South Bend Central Catholic, Saint Joseph’s Academy and South Bend Catholic — which had itself absorbed Saint Hedwig’s high school — as the banked Schools record carries the merger. The new school stood on 5.7 acres at 1441 North Michigan Street donated by the Brothers of Holy Cross, and its first class graduated in the spring of 1954. From 1953 to 1968 the school ran separate divisions for boys and girls — the Academy’s and Central Catholic’s single-sex courses continuing inside one institution — and its faculty consisted primarily of Sisters of the Holy Cross and Brothers of Holy Cross, many of them in residence: the two congregations that had staffed the city’s schools separately for a century teaching under one roof. The school’s first lay principal was Glenn Rousey, who followed Brother Francis Rotsaert, C.S.C. — the succession from brother to layman in the principal’s office marking, at this school’s size, the same transition the grade schools would make over the following decades.

The removal: In the summer of 2012 the school left the Michigan Street campus where it had stood for fifty-nine years and removed to 453 North Notre Dame Avenue, into the former St. Joseph’s Regional Medical Center building at the edge of downtown, adapted to the school; the new campus was dedicated on August 25, 2012. The school stands there in November 2026 as the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend’s South Bend high school — the web’s one surviving Catholic secondary school in the city, with Mishawaka’s Marian High School across the city line its diocesan counterpart, named here at the boundary as that build’s subject.

Sources:

1. Saint Joseph High School, the school’s own published history, saintjosephsquare.com — classes from September 20, 1953, the separate boys’ and girls’ divisions to 1968, the faculty of Holy Cross sisters and brothers in residence, and Glenn Rousey as first lay principal following Brother Francis Rotsaert, C.S.C.