Sheridan County's Daily NEWSpaper
Feature Story
Last Updated: Friday, January 23, 2004
Holy Name School celebrates
90 years in Sheridan
Focus still on study skills, hard work
By Pat Blair
Senior Staff reporter
Dave Rojo credits his years at Holy Name School for his later success.
“What I learned here,” said Rojo — who was a pupil at the school in the 1960s and now teaches social studies there — “helped me survive high school and college. The curriculum was tough, the discipline was extremely tough.”
The focus, he added, was on study skills and hard work — “and that hasn't changed.”
Rojo is one of approximately 2,000 alumni of Holy Name, one of the 600 or so who still live in Sheridan. If the numbers sound large, it's because Holy Name School has been part of the community for 90 years — since it opened for classes on Sept. 5, 1914.
Holy Name was the third Catholic school in Wyoming, according to the Rev. Ron Stolcis, a Sheridan native, pastor of Holy Name Catholic Church and another alumnus of the school. Catholic schools were established in Cheyenne and Laramie in the late 1890s and early 1900s.
The Sheridan school was founded by the Sisters of Charity from Leavenworth, Kan., who came at the request of the Rev. John Duffy, pastor of Holy Name Church from 1906-40.
Three nuns made the trip via the Burlington Railroad from Leavenworth to Sheridan: Sister Mary Seraphine Carroll, principal and teacher of grades six, seven and eight; Sister Mary Redempta O'Sullivan, teacher of grades one, two and three; and Sister Mary Martin Scanlon, a novice and teacher of the schools fourth and fifth grades.
Sister Carroll would later write to Mother Mary Berchman in Leavenworth, “I am charmed with the place (Sheridan). It is such a surprise after the long stretch of barren land through which we passed.”
A building fund drive for the school was started in 1913, and non-Catholics as well as Catholics contributed, according to “Holy Name Centennial,” a book by Sheridan writer Barbara Ketcham published in 1985 for the 100th anniversary of Holy Name Catholic Church.
Cost of the new school — the original school building on East Works Street on the north side of the school's 1952 addition — ultimately was $19,086, according to Ketcham. Several parishioners contributed $500 each, and $8,000 was borrowed from the diocese of Cheyenne.
Sister Scanlon, in a 1974 interview, recalled the school was opened before it was “entirely finished. The stairways were just boards laid across to make steps, but we opened at the appointed time.”
The original school building, according to Ketcham, had four classrooms — three used for the eight grades and the fourth for an apartment. Duffy came each day to the school to teach religion.
An athletic program was added around 1930 when Bill Redle was hired as Holy Name School's first football coach. Redle was a 1926 graduate of Holy Name and 1930 graduate of Sheridan High School. The school's team played teams from Monarch, Acme and Hill School (the Sheridan Public Schools' eighth-grade team at the time).
Stolcis, who attended Holy Name from 1948-56, said he was not athletically inclined, but he remembered participating in Christmas and St. Patrick's Day programs at the WYO Theater and for patients of the Sheridan VA hospital in the auditorium there. People didn't call it the VA hospital in those days, Stolcis said. “We talked about going up to the fort.”
Stolcis recalled there were more than 200 students enrolled in the eight grades by then. Classes were taught by nuns from the Sisters of Charity through the 1980s, although in the later years, more and more teachers came from the laity.
Rojo recalled that when he was in school in the '60s, “we started having some lay staff.”
Stolcis said the transition from nuns to lay teachers “happened little by little.” By the early 1990s, only one nun remained on the teaching staff. Today, the staff is entirely lay teachers.
Holy Name Principal Toni Wendt said the school has an enrollment this year of 108 students in prekindergarten through eighth grade. School staff numbers 20 full-time and 11 part-time employees including the janitorial staff, cooks, aides and employees for the Holy Name Preschool as well as teachers and office personnel.
The preschool was started in 1969 as an idea from a mother frustrated at trying to control her preschool-age child in church, according to Ketcham.
In recent years, Holy Name School has added a kindergarten and, this year, a prekindergarten class for 4- and 5-year-olds.
The school's sports program, Wendt said, includes boys' and girls' basketball and track and volleyball for girls — but no football program; students who want to play football can participate through Central Middle School, Wendt said.
One thing that has not changed, Wendt said, is the dedication of Holy Name's teachers — and parents. “We have teachers that are truly committed to teaching, and we have truly supportive parents. We teach the whole child. We can talk about religion and how it affects daily life.”
Religion is a core class — along with social studies, math, language arts and science. Other classes include music, art, chess and computer skills.
Children who graduate from Holy Name enter the public school, Wendt said, “and they are frequently the valedictorians and salutatorians.”
Rojo said Holy Name is “always on the cutting edge of education.” But faith remains equally important, Stolcis said.
“What hasn't changed,” he said, “is that the same Ten Commandments are being taught, the same faith, the same sacraments and the same Gospel of Jesus Christ and the triune God — Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”
