Keeping the faith

By KRISTI ALBERTSON/The Daily Inter Lake

St. Matthew's School celebrates 90 years of caring

St. Matthew's School has weathered a multitude of changes in its long history.

After nearly a century, the school has seen thousands of students come through its doors. It has added grades to meet enrollment demands and eliminated grades when that demand diminished. A teaching staff that used to be mostly nuns has given way to mostly lay teachers.

This year, the school is celebrating its 90th anniversary. St. Matthew's students and staff incorporated the anniversary celebration into last week's Catholic Schools Week, an annual recognition of Catholic schools' roles in their communities.

St. Matthew's has lasted so long, computers teacher Myrna Matulevich said, because of the school's caring atmosphere.

"It is just a really special, magical, great place," she said. "I think it's always had that feeling. It's just an awesome place to work."

The community in and around St. Matthew's is very close, Principal Gene Boyle said. Students are there because their parents want them to receive a faith-based education. Teachers, too, have chosen to be there.

"They're not paid what they would be in the public sector, but they stay," he said. "It's a close community. They enjoy each other a lot."

The school began in 1917 as Sisters of Mercy Academy and Day School. Four nuns, one lay teacher and a housekeeper were in charge of the school's 67 students, who ranged from first through ninth grade.

Several years earlier, Bishop John Carroll of the Catholic Diocese of Helena had asked the Sisters of Mercy of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to come to Kalispell to help open a hospital. After the hospital - which became Kalispell Regional Medical Center - opened in 1912, Carroll asked the sisters to open a Catholic school.

The sisters bought and remodeled a building that had gone through several reincarnations in its short lifetime, including stints as a public high school, boarding house, dormitory and Kalispell Business College. It was located on the corner of Main and Seventh streets, the site of the current teacher parking lot.

The school, which was affiliated with St. Matthew's Parish by 1921, was a combination convent and grade school. Tenth, 11th and 12th grades were added within the first four years.

The high school was discontinued in 1941, possibly because of financial trouble, Boyle said. Young men enlisting in the military during World War II may have caused a decline in enrollment, Matulevich said.

St. Matthew's Parish bought the school from Sisters of Mercy in 1956 and began constructing a new building immediately south of the existing school. Sisters and students moved into the new facility in March 1958. The sisters lived on the west side of the building on the second floor, Boyle said, in what is today the library and three classrooms.

In 1970, the school eliminated its eighth grade. Four years later, seventh grade met the same fate. In 1976, St. Matthew's School added kindergarten, and in 1982, preschool classes were added.

St. Matthew's reintroduced seventh grade in 2001 in response to a growing demand for private education, and it added eighth grade again the following year.

There has been some talk through the years about re-forming the high school, Boyle said, but it isn't a top priority now.

"They're more concerned about an addition on the church," he said. "That would precede a Catholic high school.

"High schools are expensive - more so than grade schools," he added. "It would take a major movement" to get a Catholic high school.

Not all staff and students at St. Matthew's are Catholic, Boyle said.

The last Sister of Mercy who taught at St. Matthew's, Sister Joan Schwager, left the school in 2002. Sister Judy Lund, a Dominican, currently is the only nun on staff.

All students participate in Friday mass, and religion classes are part of the curriculum.

Younger students learn the basics of Christianity, Boyle said. In second grade, kids receive their First Communion. As students get older, they gradually learn more Catholic doctrine.

Incorporating Christianity makes things such as discipline easier at St. Matthew's than at public schools, said Boyle, who spent 22 years at Flathead High School before coming to St. Matthew's 10 years ago.

"It's OK to talk about Christian beliefs," he said. "In some ways, it makes it easier because you can do that."

Those beliefs contribute to the caring atmosphere that characterizes the school, he said. It extends beyond St. Matthew's walls to include the parent community as well.

"The closeness of the people is special," he said. "They come together and make it special."

That closeness must have existed throughout St. Matthew's lifetime, he said. The school is mostly funded by tuition and donations, which would have fluctuated with parents' economic situations.

"I would imagine that over those 90 years, there were some crises when the school was about to close," he said. "Somehow they must have rallied and kept it going."

On the Net: www.stmattsaints.org

Reporter Kristi Albertson may be reached at 758-4438 or by e-mail at kalbertson@dailyinterlake.com.