Yeah, the South Bend we grew up in doesn’t exist anymore, and hasn’t for a long time now.My wife graduated from Clay in 1974 and I graduated from SBR in 1976. We both still have family in South Bend, and it has been going downhill since those years. South Bend schools are horrible and the management of it has not been good at all.
I ended up graduating from South Bend Riley after attending South Bend Jackson for three years. That change was to improve the racial diversity balance to secure more federal funding by having better diversity. Jackson was only 10 years old at that time and is still the middle school that feeds Riley. There was a sister school South Bend Lasalle that was the exact same design as Jackson, and it has been closed or repurposed I forget without asking family.
Penn was a country school like Jackson and now they are more like a Center Grove or Carmel with over a 1000 per graduating class. Penn and Jackson were considered the country or farm schools in the 70's.
Closing Clay is just another step in the disintegration of the South Bend schools. There was some discussion of closing Riley also and just having Adams and Washington but for now Riley survives.
We are both disappointed in what has happened to South Bend in general and the school corporation in particular. My bother in law pitched Clay to a state baseball championship in 1970.
I don’t think they will close Riley, as it is the most-recently built of the remaining schools.