Benet 'better' 50 years after two schools merged to become coed

Editor's note: This article has been updated to correct a quote from Carol Arthurs.

It seemed like the end of the world in 1967 when Marty Wiora's high school in Lisle, the one whose football team he once walked nearly 20 miles to Batavia to support, was set to close.

Wiora's beloved "Proco," otherwise known as the Catholic boys' school St. Procopius Academy, was to cease operations that spring.

Across the street at Sacred Heart Academy in Lisle, Carol Arthurs felt shocked when an announcement came that the all-girls school she loved for its beauty and camaraderie also would close.

None of the students liked the idea, Wiora and Arthurs said Tuesday, but officials decided to merge the schools into one academy to be called Benet. The name is short for Benedict, the Catholic saint whose philosophy the new school, like its predecessors, would follow. Translated, Benedict means "blessed."

Students felt anything but blessed to give up the strong identities they cherished.

"'It'll never work,' my classmates said, to a man," said Wiora, now dean of students at the coed school that formed after he graduated in 1967. "'You let girls into this school, it'll never be the same.'"

Instead, it became better, school officials said, as the Benet Academy community of 2017 celebrated the 50th anniversary of the school's merger and naming.

"It was no easy task for two separate schools with separate but parallel missions to be joined into the one Benet Academy we know today," Principal Stephen Marth said. "Today, in a special way, we recognize how Benet Academy came into being only as a result of letting go of the past."

Welcomed into the halls of the former all-boys school at 2200 Maple Ave., the full Benet student body grew in size, scientific achievement and gender equality, alumni and school leaders said.

Benet's population when it merged was 850, Marth said. The school now has 1,320 students, who all crowded the gym Tuesday for an anniversary Mass and assembly.

Arthurs, who went on to teach science at Benet, said the school had twice as many boys as girls when it first formed, and she was the only girl in her chemistry class.

Now she said the school teaches roughly the same number of girls as boys and nearly all take chemistry. Teachers at first were formal and used no first names for any of the students, whose parents paid between $300 and $400 a year in tuition.

But times changed and teachers became more hospitable, air conditioning was installed, a second gym and three other wings were built, and tuition increased to more than $11,000 a year.

Celebrating Mass, Abbot Austin Murphy of nearby St. Procopius Abbey encouraged students to see all of the good things at Benet as gifts from God, gifts that are meant to benefit their lives.

Former principal Ernie Stark said the anniversary should be a time of rededication to Benedictine values of work and prayer, leading a balanced life and welcoming all others as if they were Christ.

That's exactly what happened when the skeptical students of St. Procopius and Sacred Heart came together in 1967.

"By the time I graduated in 1970," Arthurs said, "the memories of the separate schools had faded."