St. Cecilia's School finally opened in the Fall, after an August 31, 1925, first enrollment of five-hundred and thirty students. The Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, had been engaged to teach, and the first teachers in the school were Mother Thomasine, and Sisters Claudia, Harriet, Cecilia, Donata, Francis Borgia, Ann Pierre, and Joan Patricia.
The Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary were first established in the United States when the Reverend Louis Florent Gillet, a Belgium Redemptorist, arrived in 1843 to establish mission chapels in and around Monroe, Michigan. Urged on by the pressing need to offer Christian instruction in Monroe for the children, and with the purpose of establishing a school, he founded the Congregation of the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, whose first convent was a log cabin, in 1843. The order was established with the aim of offering Christian education to the poor.
THE CONVENT
Father Fleming had moved in 1925 into a flat on Stoepel and converted it into a rectory. He also bought additional lots across from the church. In 1926, Father Daniel Wholihan came as his assistant and helped him to celebrate St. Cecilia's fifth birthday. The same year he converted a four- family apartment at 6324 Burlingame into a new convent for the Sisters, who moved there from their first quarters at 6389 Webb. During the Summer of 1927, another unit of four rooms was added to the school.
A DEED IS SIGNED, A HIGH SCHOOL OPENED
The deed for the property at Livernois and Stoepel, site of the present church, was signed in May, 1928. The price was $29,500.
These were the days of anniversary dinners, choral concerts, Thanksgiving dances and other social activities. They served to weld the parish into one great family. St. Cecilia's was alive and growing by leaps and bounds. By the year 1930, school enrollment had reached nine hundred and fifty. On September 4, 1930, the St. Cecilia High School was opened. Sisters who taught High School when it opened were: Sisters Thomasina, Mary Rosary, Augustine, Francis Calre and Mary Elfred. Religion was taught by Reverend Father Wholihan in the tenth, eleventh and twelfth grades. Father Juras spent two half-hours a week in each of the grades from fourth to eighth.
Continued
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