By Florida Catholic staff - Florida Catholic
FORT LAUDERDALE | Cardinal Gibbons’ longtime, much loved principal, Sister Marie Schramko, has died at the age of 102, after 85 years in religious life and 77 years of ministry in Catholic education, 54 of them at the Fort Lauderdale high school.
She died peacefully April 28 at her community’s Our Lady of Angels Retirement Home in Joliet, Illinois, where she had moved in 2015. She had celebrated her 102nd birthday Feb. 10.
Photographer: COURTESY
Sister Marie Schramko: Born Feb. 10, 1917; entered Sisters of St. Francis of Mary Immaculate in 1934; served at Cardinal Gibbons High School from 1961 to 2015; died April 28, 2019.
Cardinal Gibbons principal Paul Ott, an alumnus of the school who fondly remembers Sister Marie as a teacher, and later a colleague and friend, called her “the cornerstone of almost everything that has been accomplished here over the past 59 years. Our collective debt of gratitude is immeasurable, as is our sense of loss.”
The school will host a memorial Mass for Sister Marie at St. John the Baptist Church, 4595 Bayview Drive, Fort Lauderdale, on Thursday, May 16, at 7 p.m.
Funeral services will take place at Our Lady of the Angels in Joliet, beginning with a wake from 2 to 6:45 p.m. Monday, May 13, followed by a funeral Mass at 7 p.m. Burial will take place Tuesday morning, May 14, at Resurrection Cemetery in Romeoville, Illinois.
In 1961, at the request of Miami’s founding bishop, Coleman Carroll, Sister Marie began her 54-year ministry in Fort Lauderdale. Asked to start a co-educational Catholic high school in the northeast section of Fort Lauderdale, she arrived in August as the founding principal of the girls’ division only to discover that there were no buildings and no books — just a campus with nothing but barren sand and skeletons of brick and mortar.
In the early years, whenever the school needed a teacher, Sister Marie would go back to school herself and get the degree needed to teach the subjects.
After serving as founding principal for the girls, she served at Cardinal Gibbons as assistant principal of the combined high school. When she no longer taught in the classroom, she would still find time to be with the students. She was known for attending every athletic event, where she could be found sitting in the bleachers with her umbrella.
Sister Marie often said her greatest enjoyment was seeing her former students around Fort Lauderdale serving the community as judges, doctors and politicians.
A native of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Sister Marie attended the Johnstown Public School and St. Stephen’s Grade School and received her high school diploma at Johnstown Central Catholic High School. In 1934, she went to Joliet to enter the Sisters of St. Francis of Mary Immaculate. She earned her bachelor’s degree at the College of St. Francis — now the University of St. Francis — a master’s degree from DePaul University in Chicago and continued her education at the University of Illinois on a science grant. She later completed a master’s degree in administration and counseling at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida.
Sister Marie began her career in 1938, teaching religion, science and mathematics at St. Mary School in Columbus, Ohio. She continued teaching these same subjects at St. Francis de Sales High School in Chicago, Illinois; St. Francis Academy (Joliet Catholic Academy) in Joliet; Marybrook Academy in Maumee, Ohio; and St. Procopius High School in Chicago.
Those wishing to honor her are invited to donate to the Sister Marie Schramko Memorial Fund, which has been set up at Cardinal Gibbons High School, 2900 N.E. 47th St., Fort Lauderdale, FL, 33308. For more information, call 954-491-2900, ext. 143.
