St. Mary’s Celebrates 125 Years Of Catholic Education In Bird Island

The grounds and halls of St. Mary’s Catholic School in Bird Island were alive over the weekend, as past and present students, staff and community members came together to celebrate the school’s 125th anniversary.

St. Mary’s principal Tracy Bertrand Sigurdson, said the weekend was the schools way of appreciating the community for their support.

The weekend of fun, which occurred alongside the city’s annual Island Days festivities, included the Bird Island Bullfrogs baseball game Friday night and a wide variety of activities at the school and fairgrounds on Saturday — including tours of the school, bouncy castles, food trucks and a concert by Strange Daze at the Renville County Fairgrounds.

The celebration concluded with a celebratory mass at the church and pancakes after on Sunday.

Throughout the day on Saturday, current and former students, families and staff of St. Mary’s School toured through the school building, remembering their own times within the walls of the institution that first opened its doors in 1897.

St. Mary’s Catholic School was founded in 1897, when the Sisters of St. Joseph came to Bird Island to run the brand-new school, which was to be part of St. Mary’s Church.

St. Mary’s offered K-12 education until 1972, when the last class of seniors graduated. Since 1973 the school has provided K-8 grade education. Each year, a graduation ceremony is held for the eighth-graders.

According to trivia from Father George Schmidt, the smallest high school graduating class was that of 1919, when there were only two. The largest number of graduating seniors was 36 in 1949, 1968 and 1969.

Other school history highlights shared by Schmidt included the champion girl’s basketball team of 1922 and Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton’s visit to the school as a thank-you to McKaia Ryberg in 2012.

St. Mary’s has lived in four different buildings over its 125 years of operation.

The present-day school, located right beside the church, was built in 1915 and was originally St. Mary’s High School.

Over the past few years, maintenance projects have been done to keep the 107-year-old building in good condition.

The roof was replaced in 2018, and upcoming projects include tuckpointing the brick exterior, new windows and an upgrade playground.

And the technology has continued to change with smart boards having replaced chalkboards and students now with tablets instead of paper and pencils.