Column: After 159 years, St. Paul School in Aurora closing its doors but still eyeing future

Chicago Tribune

01-05-2025

Longtime Realtor Jack Meyer has many strong ties to Aurora. But perhaps none run as deep as his commitment to St. Paul Lutheran Church and to its school that has been teaching children – including his own father and grandfather – for the past 159 years.
So it's no wonder Meyer, who also attended K-8 at St. Paul, as did his three grown sons, considered it 'a sad day' when the decision was made earlier this year to close the school that was started in 1865 by German settlers who came to Aurora to work on the railroad.
The last day of school at St. Paul will be May 29. The church itself will remain open.
Previous poor leadership resulted in a dramatic drop in enrollment, according to St. Paul officials. There are currently only 54 students at the school at 85 S. Constitution Drive, which makes it financially impossible to keep those doors open any longer.
Still, church leaders insist they would rather focus on the positives of such a storied history. And there will, indeed, be plenty to celebrate when St. Paul Church holds a special service at 10 a.m. Sunday – potluck dinner will follow – to honor this remarkable legacy.
While no one wants to see such a historic school close its doors, this event will praise the past while also focusing on 'faith for the future,' insisted Bob French, a member of the church's board of directors who attended the school, as did his grandfather, mother and three children.
Like Meyer and French, Diane Katz also is proud of a long narrative with the school, which moved to its present location at the church on Constitution Avenue in 2009. She began working at St. Paul School as a second-grade teacher in 1991, and after becoming assistant principal, served as principal from 2012-2021 and was in that role when the new school was built in 2019 that replaced modules with six new state-of-the-art classrooms.
At the time of her retirement there were 170 students. And Katz admits that, when she heard about the closing, she considered the idea of returning from her current home in Florida to try and help keep things going.
'The teachers at St. Paul were so dedicated, such hard workers,' she told me from a student resource center in Manatee County, where she was substituting in a special education class for the day. 'It was like a family' where it was not unusual to see generations of students go through those doors.
According to St. Paul history, the school actually started a couple years before the church was built in 1852. It went through starts and stops in a small building on the corner of River Street and what is now New York Street before finding permanency in 1865 with a 20- by 30-foot building at Jackson Street and First Avenue (now Benton Street) that served around 85 students in first to fifth grades.
There, all classes were taught in German and did not switch to English-only until 1932.
By 1897, according to Meyer, there were 140 students, which led to the building of a larger school the following year – at a cost of $16,000 – at Jackson and Second Avenue. As enrollment continued to go up, a new school again was built in 1951 at Jackson and Benton.
By the time 71-year-old Meyer was in kindergarten, each grade had about 35 to 40 kids, he recalled, pointing out that Germans were 'adamant about education.'
Which could explain why there are so many Lutheran schools in the area. Unfortunately, many of them – notable exceptions include Cross Lutheran in Yorkville and Immanuel Lutheran in Batavia – are closing their doors or struggling to stay open, officials point out.
'Parochial education has changed,' said Meyer. 'We are entering a new era. We have to rethink how we approach the younger generation, how we are delivering the Gospel to where they are.'
That being said, St. Paul leaders tell me they are not looking at this so much as a closing but as a pause. Future plans include looking to restart the preschool program where, 'hopefully we can build on that, one class at a time,' Meyer said.
'Over the years I've held a lot of positions in the church and St. Paul has always risen to the occasion,' noted the longtime member who was not only baptized, confirmed and married to wife Sonja in the church, but plans to be buried there as well.
'We will see where this goes. Our new interim Pastor Gary Schultz is working his butt off,' insisted Meyer. 'And I believe we will start to see green shoots.'