The reorganization: PLJ, North Liberty, and the John Glenn School Corporation — the date in conflict

THE 1959 ACT'S COURSE IN THE COUNTY'S SOUTHWEST CORNER · THE FORMATION DATE NOT SETTLED, PRINTED WHOLE

Indiana's School Corporation Reorganization Act of 1959 set the frame, but Walkerton's consolidation ran on its own clock, and the record gives that clock two different times. The fullest single account is the obituary of Harold Rubert Muncie, the man who ran the merger. Muncie was appointed principal of Walkerton High School in the spring of 1965. In June 1972 he was named superintendent of the PLJ School Corporation. He then oversaw the merger of PLJ with North Liberty, the merger produced the John Glenn School Corporation, and he served as the new corporation's superintendent for twelve more years, leaving in April 1985 for the Western Boone schools. On that account the corporation dates from about 1973, a decade and more after the 1959 act set the county's other consolidations in motion, and the new high school dedicated in 1968 — told in the next entry — was built by PLJ, the predecessor, before the merger. Against it stands the catalog account of Sheneman's Southern St. Joseph County, the corporation's own local history: "The early 1980s brought further challenges for community leaders tasked with consolidating area schools to form the John Glenn School Corporation" — a formation a full decade later than the obituary's arithmetic, and irreconcilable with a superintendent who left the formed corporation in 1985 after twelve years of service to it. Both print, whole and unharmonized. What neither source supplies is the expansion of the initials PLJ — no record reached spells out what the three letters stand for, and this section does not guess at them. The formation's exact date, and the letters, ride as GAP-WKSCH-1, settled by the corporation's own earliest board minutes, the Indiana Department of Education's corporation history, and the State Board of Accounts' reports of the 1970s, which would show the two corporations' books becoming one.

Sources:

1. Obituary of Harold Rubert Muncie, Johnson-Danielson Funeral Home, republished by GIANT fm (March 6, 2024): the Walkerton High School principalship of 1965, the PLJ superintendency from June 1972, the merger with North Liberty forming the John Glenn School Corporation, and the twelve years ending April 1985.
2. Arcadia Publishing, catalog description of Franklin N. Sheneman II, Southern St. Joseph County: consolidation "to form the John Glenn School Corporation" placed in the early 1980s — the conflict, printed whole.
3. Indiana School Corporation Reorganization Act of 1959: the statutory frame under which the county's corporations were formed.