Faribault-Stillwater Plan

Timothy Walch

The Faribault-Stillwater Plan was a formal effort to resolve the persistent conflict between Catholic and public school educators over the content and control of local schools. Sponsored by Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul, the plan was an arrangement in the early 1890s between the cities of Faribault and Stillwater, Minnesota, and local Catholic parishes to provide publicly funded education to Catholic children in parish school buildings. In form and content, the Faribault-Stillwater Plan closely mirrored similar arrangements in use in Lowell, Massachusetts; Poughkeepsie, New York; and several other American communities in the middle of the 19th century. The Faribault-Stillwater Plan, as it came to be called, came to national attention when Archbishop Ireland spoke about the experiment at the 1890 meeting of the National Education Association held in St. Paul. By shining a spotlight on the plan, Ireland precipitated a controversy among Catholic educational leaders about the relationship between ...

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