St. Wendelin's Way
Much like St. Wendelin Catholic School straddles the borders of Summit and Oakland townships, the venerable school is poised between its 172-year-old history and a future its parents and alumni are striving to safeguard.
St. Wendelin is thought to be the one of the oldest schools in the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh.
Principal JoLynn Clouse jokingly cites the school's remoteness as the secret to its longevity because there are no nearby schools that could have made a merger or closure possible.
She said St. Wendelin was built in 1845 by George Mueller who had been hired by the German Catholic farmers in the area to teach their children. Mueller constructed the school and its attached chapel out of logs chinked with clay.
The school predates St. Wendelin Roman Catholic Church itself by 30 years. The church wasn't built until 1875-76. Previously religious services were conducted by visiting priests on weekdays.
But renovations continue every year at the school, according to Clouse.
Walls and floors have been added, stairwells changed and classrooms renovated. The brick wall in the school's entryway is the exterior brick from the original school, the trophy niche a converted original window.
“There's a picture of a class here,” said Clouse. “No one seems to know when it was taken. The closest year they've figured out is 1917.”
“We've had a multitude of people come through here looking. People have tried to see if somebody recognizes an aunt or uncle,” she said.
A possible source for the school's history are three of its oldest alumni, siblings honored last month as Alumni of the Year.
Madeline “Sis” Neff, 91; Don Weiland, 90; and Virginia Birckbichler, 92, all of Oakland Township, attended the school in the 1930s and '40s, along with their six siblings.
All three credited the daily six-mile round-trip walk from their home to the school for their continued health.
Weiland said, “People should know the things we had to do. I think we are still here because we walked to school so much. They put on the bus later. I think the hardest part was walking to school.”
Birkbichler said, “We were really closer to East Butler, but my mom preferred us to go to St. Wendelin because it was Catholic.”
Neff said, “Mom didn't send me to school until I was 7. We were two little girls walking to school.”Weiland said, “A neighbor used to take us in her Model A Ford until she got married. There were no buses, so then we had to walk.”Neff said to her sister, “I can remember you and I going through the big woods and coming out on a farm. That was a shortcut.”Weiland remembered one winter a neighbor named Walt McDonald made a horse-drawn snowplow out of wood to clear a path along the road so Weiland and his brothers and sisters could get through the snow drifts.There was a similar bare-bones, do-it-yourself spirit at work at St. Wendelin School itself.Neff said, “There was one teacher for four grades. There were four grades upstairs and four grades downstairs.”The trio said there were no inside steps between the two floors, so to send messages from one floor to another, a student would have to go outside and around the building to reach the other floor.Birckbichler said, “I took two grades at once. When I got to seventh grade, I took seventh and eighth grade classes.”Neff said the students went to Mass every day.“I was an altar server, so I had to learn all the Latin prayers. All the Masses were in Latin back then,” Weiland said.The Latin might have come in handy, because Weiland remembers there were only two teachers when he went to school and they were both nuns.Birckbichler graduated from eighth grade at 13 and then was sent to Mount Alvernia High, a private school in Millville.Weiland and Neff both went to Butler High School after completing the eighth grade.There was no talk of a “gap year” between high school and college as there is now.America entered World War II at the end of 1941.Birckbichler passed the Civil Service test and worked at Patterson Field in Dayton, Ohio, before moving back to Butler County when the VA hospital opened.Neff went to work at Armco and wrote every day to James Neff who was with the Army in the Italian campaign.Weiland said, “I worked at the Valvoline Co. in East Butler because I wanted to have some fun before I got drafted and had my head shot off.”He was drafted in 1944.
“I was going to be part of the invasion force for Japan. I floated around the Pacific for 33 days on a Victory ship full of troops and cargo.”He credits the atomic bomb drops on Hiroshima and Nagasaki for allowing him to get out of the service alive in 1946.Neff sent her eight children, and Weiland, his six children to St. Wendelin, too.In fact, Neff's two great-grandchildren are part of today's 115-member student body distributed in grades kindergarten through eighth. The preschool, located in the old convent, numbers another 22 students. They are taught by 12 full- and part-time teachers.Clouse said 80 percent of the students are from Butler County and come from the Butler, Karns City and South Butler school districts.After eighth grade, Clouse said, “Most will go on to their home school district. Some may go to St. Joseph High School in Natrona Heights or Cardinal Wuerl North Catholic High School.”“You don't have to be Catholic to attend,” said Clouse. “But we stress that students will attend weekly Mass every Wednesday at 10:15 a.m. with each grade taking turns doing the readings, petitions, offertory. And there is Stations of the Cross at the church every Friday.”The Rev. Matt McClain is the pastor of St. Wendelin.“They're learning but they are also learning how to be good people at the same time,” Clouse said.“It's a faith-based, value-instilled education. It's a good start for Catholic faith in their childhood,” said Clouse, who herself has two daughters attending St. Wendelin.“The schools of the Diocese of Pittsburgh are uniquely Catholic, and exist for the purpose of promoting a Catholic way of life based on Gospel values,” said Michael Latusek, superintendent of schools in the diocese.“Catholic schools play an important role in passing on the faith, increasing knowledge and promoting service. St. Wendelin School is a perfect example,” he added.This continuity and tradition is evident in the multiple generations of families that have attended St. Wendelin.Clouse said, “If you teach here, it's because you really want to teach.This pride is evident in the parents and grandparents coming back to the school to remodel and refurbish the building and in the teachers who volunteer their time to run after-school activities such as sign language and drama clubs.Parents' fees, church support and the parent teacher guild, as well as the diocese, give financial support to the school.
