Sisters reflect on St. Mary School’s 75th jubilee

‘A love for learning, a love for the Lord, and a love for other people’

By Gabrielle Nolan

St. Mary School in Oak Ridge is celebrating 75 years of education and service of its kindergarten-through-eighth-grade students.

The school, which will have jubilee celebrations in the spring and the fall of this year, in a special way recognizes the Religious Sisters who have been present since the doors opened on Vermont Avenue on Sept. 10, 1950.

The Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia Congregation, whose motherhouse is located in Nashville, have staffed the school as principals and teachers, forming children both spiritually and academically. The Sisters are placed nationwide in 53 schools across 31 dioceses.

Four Dominican Sisters shared their experiences and memories of St. Mary School with The East Tennessee Catholic to commemorate the 75th jubilee.

Sister Mary John Slonkosky, OP

The current principal at St. Mary School, Sister Mary John was assigned to Oak Ridge in 2021 after serving as principal for eight years at a school in Virginia. Prior to that, she served as principal at other Catholic schools for about 10 years.

Sister Mary John said her religious community’s charism is “teaching the Christian education of youth in service of the Church.”

“Our efforts and our response to God’s call is to bring His truth and the Gospel to the people we’re sent to, whatever their age,” she said. “So, to be that support, that teaching arm of the bishop, that support of the parish to provide for the Catholic education of their children, that’s our focus and is part of our call of being St. Cecilia Dominicans.”

A weekly experience that she enjoys the most at St. Mary School is leading children to the Lord at Mass.

“I enjoy watching the children really day to day, but week by week, when we go to Mass together as a school, watching them participate more and more, and truly love going to church,” she said. “You can see it by their actions and their smiles and their joy in being there together and singing and participating in Mass.”

Sister Mary John also loves student performances, whether it’s a music program or the eighth-graders taking part in the Way of the Cross.

“They are putting what they’ve learned into a way of sharing themselves with parents and the community and seeing their joy in doing that and being proud that they’ve accomplished something good,” she said.

As principal, Sister Mary John said she values working with students who are having a difficulty of some sort, whether with friends, in academics, or behavior.

“Helping them know that they’re good and they’re made in God’s image, that mistakes and problems don’t define us, but we can work together to work through them and learn from them or find ways to accept what we can and work with it,” she said. “I do really find joy in trying to help them through those times.”

Sister Mary John shared that the 75th jubilee of the school is “a historic experience.”

“Knowing there’s 75 years behind where we are today is a great strength and support, a sense of tradition and stability of what has taken place here for all the children who have walked through these doors,” she remarked. “So, it’s an honor to be a part of this time and the life of the school to recognize 75 years and all those Sisters and priests and deacons and laypeople and parents and kids and students who have made this school what it is today and brought it to this point. Just praying to keep it moving forward and providing such a strong foundation in the lives of our young people.”

Sister Anne Catherine Burleigh, OP

Currently serving the Dominican Sisters as the vicaress general in Nashville, Sister Anne Catherine was principal at St. Mary School from 2006 to 2009.

“I was a young principal when I was first assigned there, and I had never been in East Tennessee before, and I found such a wonderful, warm, interesting place,” she shared. “Oak Ridge has such an interesting history; I didn’t know anything about it when I first went there. So, to just learn here in the middle of East Tennessee are all these scientists who live here and highly educated people who had moved here obviously to work with the Oak Ridge laboratories and all of that. I was totally fascinated by the history of the area, and also really the beauty, the natural beauty of East Tennessee. One of the great joys of being there was to get out and do a lot of hiking and being in the mountains and just being surrounded by the mountains.”

As she recalled her time in Oak Ridge, Sister Anne Catherine said the most wonderful part was the people she met.            “So, what I loved about being there was the beauty of being in a parish school, and I really did feel that it was a true community,” she explained. “So, the school was so much the heart of the center of life for those families who lived in the area. The parish had a lot going on, and the parents would not only be coming to school events, but they’d be coming to parish events — the fish fry, the fall festival. I just loved that whole idea of community where everybody’s life is centered around the parish.”

The other component of the parish that Sister loved: it was multigenerational.

“So, some of those older people had originally come to Oak Ridge to work in the labs, they had been there during the war, so they had all of that history. And, of course, the parish was started by those faithful Catholics who were sent there for work, and so I thought there was such a rich history. And sometimes some of the older people in the parish would come speak to the students about what it used to be like in Oak Ridge,” she shared.

As a first-time principal, Sister Anne Catherine loved the faculty and staff that she worked with.

“Anne Garrett, at the time, was a seventh-grade homeroom teacher, and she was also the vice principal in the school. I will forever be indebted to Anne because she really showed me the ropes and was so good to work with, as were all the other teachers. A lot of them had been there a long time — Kathy Loudon, Marsha Sega, her husband is a deacon still in the diocese. Just lots of people, Karen Lee, it was great. And great families. Even though I was only there three years, I just felt like it was a home,” she said.

Having a humanities background as an English major, Sister Anne Catherine commented how she was impressed with the science education at St. Mary School.

“I gained a great appreciation for the importance of science because it was just part of the community,” she said.

“But I think also for the Dominican Sisters who had been there, our community has been there since the school was started, we have always prized excellence in academics and intellectual formation alongside spiritual formation, that we realize faith and reason really do go together. So, I saw that our charism as Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia, I think, found a happy home in Oak Ridge where people valued education. So, it really was a strong, and I think to this day is a strong academic school but situated in a true Catholic community,” she added.

Sister Marie Blanchette Cummings, OP

A Nashville Dominican for 44 years, Sister Marie Blanchette is currently the principal at Overbrook Catholic High School in Nashville. She was assigned to Nashville after serving at St. Mary School from 2013 to 2021.

“I was the principal the whole eight years, and I loved being there,” she said. “The students were so friendly, not just to me but to anyone who walked in the building. The families were very involved in their education.”

Some of her favorite memories included all-school Masses where everyone gathered together “to worship the Lord as a family and sang our hearts out.”

“I loved greeting the children every morning. I would hold the door open to the school and speak to each child coming in and often got lots of hugs during that time,” she recalled.

Sister Marie Blanchette shared that her time as principal at St. Mary School did shape her as a person and as an educator.

“It was the first time in a long time that I had been at a parish school, and so it was a real delight to be immersed in the parish as well as the school,” she said. “I knew a lot of parishioners helped, was on the planning committee for one of the parish feast-day dinners and celebrations, and the parishioners supported the school. It was very much a family feeling.”

One of her efforts while principal was attending the Latino Enrollment Institute at the University of Notre Dame.

“I think when I got [to St. Mary] there may have been nine Hispanics, and by the time I left there were 44 in the school. So, I felt that was a really good thing to reach out to our Hispanic brothers and sisters and make sure that they had a place … just was very happy to provide a Catholic education for anyone at St. Mary’s who wanted it,” Sister Marie Blanchette said.

She remembered the dedication of her teachers and their commitment to the children.

“I have a great memory,” she shared. “There was one year that I showed up at like 8 o’ clock on a Friday night before school started, and the second-grade Sister was brand new to St. Mary’s, and I said, you want to go see your classroom? And she said yes, so we walked into the building Friday night, maybe like Aug. 1. There were three teachers in the building working. Isn’t that beautiful? That speaks to the dedication. So, that was so powerful.”

The teachers also had a good relationship with their students.

“We had a Sister who taught fifth grade, and she was from Australia originally, and she taught the kids how to play rugby,” Sister Marie Blanchette said. “To go outside at recess and watch them playing, and they would invite the priests to play, there was just a real joy in learning, and the children really grasped that they were made in the image and likeness of God, which is the foundation of everything in our Catholic faith.”

The Dominican Sister said she will be attending the jubilee celebrations in May.

“I loved my time there; I loved being part of the parish and all the friends that I made there, and all of that made it really hard to leave because I got attached to so many of the people who were there, both at the school and the parish. And I just found it to be a wonderful faith community,” she shared.

Sister Scholastica Niemann, OP

Sister Scholastica and her family moved to Oak Ridge when she was in the second grade. She attended St. Mary School and Knoxville Catholic High School, being educated by the Dominican Sisters. Now she is one of them, teaching her own freshman students English in Knoxville.

“It’s all come full circle,” she said. “So, to grow up and come back to where I was educated and where I went to high school … to teach here and to live at St. Mary’s, it’s just provided a really nice perspective that I didn’t have before, to go back to where you came from. … You know a place when you are from there, but to go back to it again as an adult with different experiences you kind of know it in a different way. So, it’s allowed me to see kind of the bigger picture of what St. Mary’s is all about. … I just love the school, it’s a beautiful place to grow up.”

Sister Scholastica said that when she was a student in the 1990s, St. Mary felt like a family.

“My older siblings all went to the school there, so it was like our second home. We actually spent so much time at school that I felt like if I wasn’t at home, I was at school or the parish. I really got to know the Sisters there, they were some of the most peaceful and happy and just beautiful witnesses of religious life,” she shared.

The memories most fresh in her mind were her seventh- and eighth-grade years, where her math and science teachers were some of her toughest.

“They also instilled in me a great love for kind of the discipline of learning. Even when a subject matter doesn’t come easily, I remember the teachers there just always being so—emphasizing this is hard work, but that’s OK. So, I grew to love the work that’s associated with learning,” she explained.

Learning also was part of her family culture.

“In my family, the intellectual part of the faith was really emphasized, so learning what the Church taught, why the Church teaches that, was really important in my family,” Sister Scholastica said. “We didn’t have a lot of the devotional, the more kind of set prayer times as a family, that wasn’t my experience as much growing up. But it was very much like why does the Church teach what she teaches. I think at St. Mary’s, I was really introduced to not just the intellectual side of the faith but also kind of the heart, the devotion.”

Sister Scholastica said the seed of her vocation to religious life was planted during her eighth-grade year at St. Mary School.

“My father got sick and passed away,” she shared. “I remember the community, the whole parish was really so supportive of my family, but the Sisters in a particular way just became so attentive to what my family needed. So, it was just planted in the back of my mind, I think, through that experience just a desire to walk with people in their suffering. Because I had this experience of suffering in grade school, and I saw the kind of spiritual motherhood of the Sisters of taking care of my family, kind of walking with us through that grief. It just planted a seed I think.”

At the end of her time in college at the University of Dallas, where Sister Scholastica studied theology, a classmate announced that she was going to join the Nashville Dominicans after graduation.

“It was the first time I’d heard somebody not from Tennessee talk about the Nashville Dominicans, and I thought how does she know my Sisters? And then I thought, why do I call them my Sisters? I haven’t seen them in years. After college, I spent a few years kind of praying and discerning and visited the motherhouse and got to learn a little bit about their formation process and what it looks like to enter the convent and eventually applied and was accepted,” she said.

Of all the far-reaching cities she could have been assigned to, Sister Scholastica never thought she would return to her home of Oak Ridge.

“When I was assigned to Knoxville to teach at Knoxville Catholic High School, and I realized I’d be living in Oak Ridge at St. Mary’s, I was very excited,” she remarked. “The only time I had really been back before that was when we take a home visit in the summer, so I was visiting my family, and I would stop by the school and say hi to the teachers. So, I still have family that live in the area. My mom lives in Oak Ridge and is a parishioner at St. Mary’s, and my sister and her husband and her family.”

Sister Scholastica said if she had been asked as a child what she wanted to be when she grew up, she would have said a teacher.

“But what I really meant was I want to be a teacher like them, I want to be a spiritual mother to those students,” she explained. “And just the example of St. Dominic, the preacher who is on fire with love for the Lord. The Sisters were always so joyful and so filled with Scripture.”

“I guess it comes down to a love for learning, a love for the Lord, and a love for other people,” she said.