Daytona State College is renaming its College of Workforce and Continuing Education for Mary Karl, who founded the school that eventually folded into Daytona State College.

DAYTONA BEACH The name Mary Brennan Karl was so revered in the early 1960s, the second new building constructed on the campus of Daytona Beach Junior College was named for her.

The Mary Karl Library saw a lot of students come and go over the decades. With the library newly relocated in the new Daytona State College Gale Lemerand Student Center, the old library building is about to be torn down.

That left college President Tom LoBasso with unfinished business. "We said, Wait a minute. We cant just say thanks and end it there, " he said.

[READ ALSO: Daytona Beach native, former Florida Supreme Court Justice Fred Karl dies]

So this month DSC officials put her name on the Mary Karl College of Workforce and Continuing Education. LoBasso, college Board Chair Randy Howard, associate vice president Sherryl Weems and Rick Karl, Mary Karls grandson, all helped tell the story at a ceremony attended by approximately 200 people at the Advanced Technology College on Thursday.

"It is no stretch to say that Daytona State College would not exist if it were not for the efforts of Mary Brennan Karl, whose passion for education in the first half of the 20th century changed the lives of so many young men and women," LoBasso said.

Karls contributions

Her work through the Great Depression and, later, World War II, not only linked people with skills that would propel them to gainful employment, but also secured from the federal government 29 acres from where Daytona State Colleges main campus now sprawls.

Mary Brennan Karl, born in 1895 in Harbor Beach, Michigan, had a comfortable upbringing. Her father was a banker, said Rick Karl, director of aviation and economic resources at Daytona Beach International Airport and Mary Karls grandson.

She married Fred J. Karl in 1920, according to a News-Journal biography, and started a family in Florida. Circumstances changed.

"They lost everything in the Depression," Rick Karl said. "They were actually in poverty. It drove her to become a public school teacher to survive, really."

She started teaching at Mainland High School in 1930, then later became director of the Opportunity School, training students in business English, typing and shorthand. Later called the Volusia County Vocational School, its offerings expanded to include construction trades and tourism and hospitality training, LoBasso said.

In World War II, the school trained welders, boat builders and mechanics. After the war, her vision was ambitious enough to pursue an expansion. Working with U.S. Sen. Claude Pepper and Daytona Beachs other educational giant, Mary McLeod Bethune, Karl requested the federal government give to Volusia County the Welch Training Center, 55 buildings used during the war to train the Womens Army Corps and as a convalescent center by the Army.

That old Army training base is now the site of Daytona State Colleges main campus.

Rick Karl said he is inspired by the story of his grandmother and Bethune traveling by train to Washington to meet with Eleanor Roosevelt, whose call to the Pentagon helped seal the deal.

"This is a story about three women collaborating in the 1940s to make something like this happen. So thats what were proud of: that a single person not of wealth but of tenacity can get out and make something like this happen."

Mary Karl died in 1948, the same year the feds gave her vocational school the old Army base. A News-Journal editorial in 1959 would call her "a virtual martyr to the task of community building."

Mary Karls legacy

Her vocational school was folded into Daytona Beach Junior College when it was established in the 1957.

Art Giles a former Volusia County councilman and the founder of Giles Electric Co. Inc., a South Daytona business now led by his son Brad attended the Mary Karl Vocational School in 1957 and 1958. He studied electrical apprenticeship classes, which taught him blueprint reading and basic wiring.

"Most of the people studying there ended up working at (Cape Canaveral), building the launch towers," Giles said. "(Later, in the 1960s) I wound up going to a class down here at Mary Karl Vocational School and when the GE people who were teaching that class left, they sent me to Houston to train for that and I became an adjunct professor to teach that one course. I taught about 45 different people."

Thousands of people have gotten training over the decades, as the junior college became Daytona Beach Community College and later Daytona State College.

Sherryl Crooms, associate vice president of the Mary Karl College of Workforce and Continuing Education, said shes impressed by Karls vision and tenacity, given the political and cultural context of the times in which Karl built her school.

"Kudos to Mrs. Karl for understanding that when you invest in people with education and training opportunities, you invest in your community," Crooms said. "And when you invest in your community, you invest in the economy."

Link:
DSC honors its founding mother of workforce education, Mary Karl - Daytona Beach News-Journal