Eyesore? Julienne is on the National Register of Historic Places and has been named one of Ohio’s Most Endangered Historic Sites by Preservation Ohio. The classic 1926-era building is still structurally sound, maintaining most of its historic integrity.
Julienne High School, a Catholic girls school, was a Dayton institution from 1927 to 1973. It is hallowed ground because it is the alma mater of martyred Dayton nun, Sister Dorothy Stang, class of 1949, who became Julienne’s most famous graduate when she was martyred in the Amazon in 2005 fighting to preserve the rainforest.
The Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, the religious order that founded the high school, constituted at least 90 percent of the faculty.
“The sisters seemed to have some intangible spirit, a peace, a happiness, a deep secret of some kind,” Sister Damienne Grismer, class of ’47, once told me. It’s a spirit that was passed on not only to Dorothy Stang but to generations of Dayton women, including my mother, Vera Seiler McCarty, class of 1946.
Yet eyesore isn’t the word that I find most offensive in the district’s defense of destroying one of Montgomery County’s historic treasures.
The most offensive word is “promise.”
Here’s the real promise that is being made to generations of Dayton schoolchildren:
We promise to teach you to value new and shiny over our region’s history.
We promise we won’t do a thing to get around the Ohio School Facilities Commission’s absurd bias for new construction over renovation.
We promise we will preserve fewer of Dayton’s historic school buildings than any other major district in the state.
We promise that you will one day understand the words of the great Joni Mitchell: “You don’t know what you’ve got ’till it’s gone.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2209 or mmccarty@DaytonDaily News.com.
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