For five decades, the southside high school has catered to students who have wanted a Catholic education.
Grandparents who were educated at the building that now houses Roncalli High School have sent their children to the school. And their children have sent their children, as Roncalli has become a family tradition for hundreds of families.
Now, the school is celebrating 50 years, where thousands of teenagers have been educated since the school was officially opened and founded on April 17, 1969. Roncalli’s community is planning alumni dinners, events and a podcast that tout the school’s storied history.
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“It is a family tradition, it is a family here,” said Tina Hayes, Roncalli’s director of advancement.
Ten Catholic parishes in the Indianapolis area feed into Roncalli High School and some families in those parishes choose to send their child to Roncalli. The Indianapolis Archdiocese has three other Catholic high schools around Indianapolis. Currently, families drive from as far as Columbus and Martinsville to get educated at Roncalli, said Gary Armbruster, director of alumni relations.
“It has had a huge impact on the Catholic community,” he said.
The idea is that families in the area may want their children to have Catholic educations. Offering that education is part of the school’s mission, Armbruster said.
“Part of our mission is to do everything we can to allow that to happen,” he said.
Roncalli High School’s building at 3300 Prague Road, Indianapolis, was formerly Bishop Chartrand High School. Kennedy Memorial High School, which was formerly Sacred Heart High School, was in the area too, he said.
The two high schools consolidated onto Bishop Chartrand High School’s campus and formed one school. Roncalli High School was then formed on that spring day in the late 1960s. About 750 students filled up Roncalli that first school year.
“It allowed us to put all of our resources into that one school,” Armbruster said.
Students and staff of both schools helped choose the name of the new Catholic high school on the southside.
The group discarded other names such as Southside Catholics, before they settled on Roncalli. Roncalli’s namesake is the name of Pope John XXIII, who had died about six years before Roncalli students chose his name as the name of their school.
Three other Catholic high schools across the country adopted the same name for the same reason, Armbruster said.
“He would have been very prominent in that time,” he said.
Now, Roncalli High School consistently has around 1,200 students, Armbruster said.
Families who send their children to Roncalli do so because it is a family tradition, said vice president for institutional advancement Terese Carson said.
Roncalli’s history can be traced back to the 1920s, when a few dozen students graduated each year from Sacred Heart High School, Carson said.
“We have those roots from so many years ago from Catholic education,” she said.
The school’s athletic program has grown over the years, and so have the curriculum and other extracurricular activities.
But the school owes the students and families who sent their children to the first schools that made up the southside Catholic school tradition, Carson said.
“Everything that they did all those years ago, we still do, but we have been able to grow and enhance it,” she said.
Roncalli High School offers dozens of sports for students to play, fields a marching band and has several theater productions a year.
“We have spent some time, energy and money on making sure our students find something to do outside the school day as well,” Carson said.
The mission has remained the same throughout the decades: to give families a place where they can send their children to receive an education with a religious background, Carson said.
“It comes down to the fact that they have had such a great experience and they want that for their children and grand children,” she said.
