St. Joseph’s School was the Catholic school in Circleville, Ohio, that Billy Milligan and his siblings attended during a period of upheaval in their family life. It first appears as a place where Billy’s quick drawing drew admiration; his second-grade experience there instead fixed school in the story as a site of punishment and religious conflict.

Setting and Family Circumstances

After leaving Dick Jonas for the second time, Dorothy Moore supported herself and her children by waitressing at the Lancaster Country Club and singing in cocktail lounges, including the Continental and the Top Hat. She placed the children at St. Joseph’s School while they lived in Circleville. The account presents the school within this precarious family period, before Chalmer Milligan decided to move the children into the city school system.

Billy’s Schooling and Punishment

Billy got along well in first grade, where the nuns praised his drawing. At six, he could sketch quickly, and his handling of light and shadow impressed them. The change came in second grade, when Sister Jane Stephens insisted that he use only his right hand for writing and drawing. She treated his left-handedness as something to be corrected and threatened to force it out of him.

The punishment is rendered through Shawn’s experience: he sees Sister Jane approach with a ruler, knows he is about to be punished but cannot understand what he has done, and cringes as she strikes his left palm. The blows are silent in his perception. His tears and his repeated sense that he is being punished for something he did not do turn a classroom discipline into an episode of bewilderment and injustice.

Removal and Religious Conflict

Chalmer took the three children out of St. Joseph’s School and enrolled them in the Circleville city school system. As an Irish Protestant, he objected to having his family attend a Catholic school and required them to go to the Methodist Church. The children resented the change in their prayers: the Ave Maria and the Lord’s Prayer, which they already knew, gave way to children’s prayers such as Now I lay me down to sleep.

Billy responded to the imposed change by deciding that, if he had to change religions, he would follow the faith of his father, Johnny Morrison, and be Jewish. The school’s place in the narrative therefore extends beyond education: its removal marks a shift in the children’s religious routine and exposes how adult authority could determine both where they learned and what they were expected to believe.

Narrative Significance

St. Joseph’s School is associated with two sharply contrasting experiences: recognition of Billy’s artistic ability and the punishment of a trait he could not simply will away. The transition from praise for his drawing to blows for using his left hand gives the school a double significance in his early life. Its closure as the children’s school came not through Billy’s choice, but through Chalmer’s religious authority, followed by a new set of prayers that the children resisted.