Our Needs

School Campus Improvements

While many Catholic schools throughout North Dakota and across the United States have recently closed, St. Joseph’s School is thriving. In fact, due to its overwhelming success, our parish community has added 7th and 8th grade classes and an all-day pre-kindergarten class to the school.

To quickly and easily accommodate this growth we temporarily remodeled our existing educational facility:

Our computer lab and chapel were converted into new 7th and 8th grade classrooms.
The religious education classroom became the classroom for our pre-kinderegarten children.
The religious education office was merged into our staffroom.

These changes, while expedient, were meant to be temporary because of the lost space and resources.

The need remains for a new and expanded multi-faceted learning resource center to replace the previous school computer lab and chapel.
We also have no research and learning area because we are without a school computer lab.

Church Campus Improvements

New Church Carpeting

Our 25-year-old carpeting is stained, frayed, repaired with duct tape in some areas, and is simply worn out.
It is also unsafe and a liability because burst water pipe flooding caused the carpet to ripple in places which has caused tripping and stumbling.

New Hearing Impaired Equipment

Large rooms with many hard surfaces are not hearing friendly and even with the best sound systems, reverberation and ambient noise is a huge problem for those with hearing loss and hearing aids. Our current audio equipment does not meet everyone's needs to hear the Mass, fully discern and enjoy the word of God and hymns of song and praise, and clearly understand church announcements.

New Rectory Windows

All of our rectory windows are ill-fitting, drafty, and energy inefficient.

The 30-year-old windows were not of the best quality or custom fit and have deteriorated over the years. The many cracks and gaps between the windows and walls are drafty and even allow bugs access to the interior.
To conserve energy and address comfort issues, window draft pads and heavy curtains are used to impede drafts on cold weather days. However, it is difficult to regulate comfortable temperatures for our pastor and guests.
The gas seal around many of the windows is broken, causing moisture to form between the windowpanes.

New Multi-Use/Multi-User Learning Resource Center

Our students and parish no longer have a computer lab or digital research and learning area. For a parish that prides itself on educational excellence, this must change.

We have no place to access religious educational learning resources.
There are no small rooms for specialized learning, education and meetings.
There is no place to serve as a archive for church and school historic memorabilia.

New Multi-Use/Multi-User School Campus Chapel

As always, all-school Masses are held in the gymnasium, which is not a reverential or sacred space for the holy sacrifice of the Mass.

There is no convenient chapel for individual class and all-school Masses or for teaching our children more about the Catholic liturgy and faith.
We don’t have a smaller sacred space where we can hold daily Masses, smaller weddings, funerals or other services. Because of this, we must use, heat and cool our church for these purposes, which is not very energy efficient.

We thought we could address our need for a new chapel through the purchase and relocation of an old wood frame church in Lakota. However, after further evaluation of the building’s age and condition, moving issues, and other unknown and ongoing costs, our church leadership decided this would not be the best stewardship of funds.