Copper Valley School

In 1956, Jesuits from the Oregon Province of the Society of Jesus and the Sisters of Saint Ann formed a partnership to open the Copper Valley School—a boarding school for Native Alaskan children—near Glennallen, Alaska. Bishop Francis Doyle Gleeson saw the need for a good boarding school closer to villagers, which became a plan to build the Copper Valley School. St. Ann Sister George Edmond went to the East Coast and persuaded five students to teach at Copper Valley. Bishop Gleeson formed a team of lay volunteers, mostly engineering students from Gonzaga University. These lay volunteers, brought into Alaska by Gleeson and Edmond, were the first recruits of what became the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. The religious, the students and volunteers faced much adversity in constructing the school, including working in temperatures of seventy-below-zero during the Alaska winter. One student from a local village described the experience of meeting the new volunteers as bringing him "into a whole new world."The volunteers were considered lay missionaries. Copper Valley School closed in 1971.