In 1975, a classmate of a 17-year-old senior at St. John’s Cathedral High School asked her to attend a vocational retreat. It would prove a fateful moment – there, that senior met a boy who would become a prom date and eventually a serious boyfriend.
But Debra Marie Sciano also met someone else intriguing on that retreat – the nuns of the School Sisters of Notre Dame. She continued to visit them on weekend retreats. “They seemed really down to earth and joyful – I loved their mission,” Sciano recalls, a mission she describes as “education, unity and creating community together.”
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She was faced with a tough decision, the first of many in her life: follow love or follow God? “Ultimately, I realized I felt the call to religious life.” She decided on the path of the sisterhood and broke off her relationship.
Today at age 65, the petite, plainly dressed, bespectacled and humble “Sister Deb” might not appear to be someone whose high-level decisions have affected the lives of thousands of people. But she is, and making the right choice is the consistent theme of her life. Time after time – first as an assistant district attorney handling sensitive cases involving children, now as leader of the School Sisters of Notre Dame (SSND) Central Pacific Province – she has had to make difficult, sometimes heartbreaking decisions to shepherd the nearly 200-year-old order through modern times. Foremost among them: the move in recent years of the Milwaukee SSND’s home from a bucolic campus that had housed the sisters for 162 years to a new development at Mount Mary University.
“She has really strong leadership skills, which I think come from enormous amounts of empathy,” says Mark Cameli, an attorney who has worked with Sciano and the SSND in several advisory board roles. “Great leaders can understand the people whom they lead and what those in and out of the organization think, what is of concern, how they feel – she’s able to do that.”
SCIANO COMES from a Sicilian family – her grandparents came directly from Italy – that lived in a three-bedroom duplex on the East Side. Her parents had a room, her two older sisters shared one, and Debra bunked with her grandmother, Grazia Gazzana aka Nana, in her room.
“The thing I remember the most, besides her loving support and her deep faith, she always instilled in us the most important part about life – that we love and respect one another,” Sciano says of Nana, who helped raise the girls while their parents worked.
She says that her teenage announcement that she was joining the sisterhood was “initially very difficult for my parents – they totally did not expect it,” says Sciano. “They were hoping I’d get married to an Italian American and have grandchildren.”
Sciano’s parents couldn’t imagine their daughter, who loved to go out with friends and participated in sports and the school musical, becoming a nun. “They pictured me locked away,” Sciano says. They imagined the stereotypical vision of nuns, dressed in a full black and white habit, isolated in a far-off convent.
The School Sisters of Notre Dame differ greatly from other Catholic orders. They don’t wear habits, for example, and are more integrated into society. For many orders, nuns’ “main work is prayer. They might do some other kinds of things like making hosts they can sell, but they’re away from the world, so to speak,” Sciano explains. “As [School Sisters], we live more of an apostolic life, we are out there and ministering to God’s people.”
Sciano took three vows to become a sister: consecrated celibacy; apostolic obedience, which is “being obedient to the will of God in our lives,” Sciano says; and a life of “gospel poverty.” Sciano explains that last vow doesn’t mean the sister can’t own anything, but “we put all our money in a pot and budget for what we need. We share and hold all in common.”
Even as many of the sisters are aging out of active teaching roles, they still promote and support educational institutions that follow their vision around the world – two local examples being Mount Mary and Notre Dame School of Milwaukee on the South Side. In addition to education, Sciano notes SSND’s work in other ministries including justice and peace action, parish work, pastoral care, social work and health care.
“Growing up, I always wanted to be a lawyer, that was my goal in life, to serve the underprivileged, to work with families, and children especially.”
– Sister Debra Marie Sciano
One of the first sisters to have an impact on Sciano’s life was Sister Mary Jacqueline Buckley, who was the provisional leader of Milwaukee SSND when Sciano entered the sisterhood. Buckley became a mentor to Sciano and helped guide her into her years of formation – a kind of apprenticeship period before sisters take their vows. Buckley joined the SSND in 1954 and led the Milwaukee SSND from 1975-82 before being sent to Rome to serve on the order’s General Council for 10 years.
“She was a young woman with great potential and a wonderful personality,” says Buckley, 94, on her initial impressions of Sciano. “She has such an ability to bring people together.” Buckley adds that Sciano thinks well on her feet and “can say hard things in a velvet way.”
Buckley also helped the Sciano family accept their daughter’s new life. “Sister Jacqueline went with me to see my parents at a difficult time when they were not understanding. They thought they were protecting me,” Sciano says. “She was the bridge that connected – they got to know the community and saw that I was happy, and it was the right place for me to be.”
But Sciano had a somewhat unusual request for the SSND. As its name implies, the order focuses on education, but Sciano’s ambition was for a different career. “Growing up, I always wanted to be a lawyer, that was my goal in life, to serve the underprivileged, to work with families, and children especially,” Sciano says. “My family always opened their doors to people, whoever it was.
“I said to Sister Jacqueline, ‘If I were to enter the community, if you would accept me, could I go to law school? Because that’s what I feel a call to,’” Sciano says.
Buckley saw Sciano’s potential. The answer was yes.
SCIANO, WHO had a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from UW-Milwaukee, set off to live in a convent in Miami while she attended law school at St. Thomas University. In 1988, Milwaukee County District Attorney Michael McCann hired her to work as an assistant DA, a job she had for over 12 years. She started in family court, where she handled things like child support enforcement, but soon moved to Children’s Court, a division that handles custody battles as well as criminal matters involving child abuse and neglect, and young offenders.
McCann described Sciano as having all the traits an attorney needs to succeed in that setting, including strong character, a steady demeanor, good judgment and a soft touch with people. “You need patience, you’re going to see things that distress you, the ability to not be judgmental,” he says. “You’re dealing with a cross section of people with various economic challenges, different attitudes on child upbringing, sometimes situations that obviously involve drugs. So it’s complex, and your interest is – save that kid.”
A couple of years into her career, Sciano was living in the convent at Saints Peter and Paul Parish on the East Side. There, she had worked with Bishop Richard Sklba to create a garden between the convent and the rectory. One day, they were tending to it together and talking. “He would always ask me, ‘How is your work? How are you feeling about it?’” Sciano recalls. She confided in him that the job was difficult – day in and day out working on cases embroiled in so much pain.
“It was heartbreaking to see children that had suffered so much abuse, abandonment, you name it. I told him, ‘It’s just so hard for me. It’s easy to love and reach out to the kids and want to protect and do what’s right for them, but to reach out to the parents was so difficult when I knew what they were doing to these kids.’” Emotions were often high, and Sciano says she received several death threats.
Sklba told her something that would stick with her: “Those are the ones to whom you are called,” Sciano recalls. “I was like, oh boy. I took that to heart, and as difficult and as concerned and angry as I was at many times, I knew that many of [the parents] had undergone abuse and were in their own cycle of violence, not knowing how to parent. It was rewarding to see parents that were able to overcome substance abuse issues, get the help they needed, and learn how to parent.”
Lindsey Draper worked as an assistant district attorney in Children’s Court and later as an assistant state public defender. Draper and Sciano became fast friends. “Deb is one of those people who is always incredibly mindful of the long-term impact not only of the work we did regarding the children, but also the parents,” he says. “It gets easy to be judgmental, but she was one of the people whose compassion and whose outlook took that into account. What stood out in working with her was that she had expectations that I think we all have of parents but also recognized that people do fall from grace, and they need help rising and need support to fill in the blanks that weren’t always properly addressed.”
Sciano left the DA’s office in 2001 after she was elected to the local SSND council. She later started her own practice as a family mediator, helping families work through divorce amicably.
“My training and work in the DA’s office helped me. I learned you can have all the skills in the world, but the number one gift to being a mediator is presence, to be calm enough and try to deescalate where there are these high emotions,” Sciano says. “I say to my sisters, you sometimes don’t know the difference you make just by listening, just by showing you care. Even if I made a teeny tiny difference in the world, it was important.”
Dough Therapy
WITH THE HIGH PRESSURE of Children’s Court and the decisions she’s had to make in various leadership roles with the SSND, some of Sciano’s methods for finding a life balance are what you might expect from a sister. She prays daily and talks to a spiritual director at least once a month about work-life balance. She is still involved at Saints Peter and Paul parish, where she sings in the choir.
She also describes American Family Field as her “happy place” – as a kid, she would keep score from the Brewers radio broadcasts – and she loves to take in the beauty of nature.
But her pastime most appreciated by others is cooking and baking, which she learned from her mother and grandmothers.
“Making pizza and Italian bread – that’s a really great therapy, literally getting your hands in the dough,” Sciano says. It also gives her satisfaction to feed others and build community with shared meals, whether it’s for a few of her fellow sisters, or hundreds at an event. Most well-known are Sciano’s Sicilian pizzas, thrown together for SSND and Mount Mary meetings and parties.
“Like any good Italian, or in her case Sicilian to be more specific, food is centric to her relationships and her life, so she cooks for herself and her sisters, her friends,” says friend Mark Cameli. “She can bring it in the kitchen.”
IN 2001, Sciano began walking the path to her current provincial leadership role by joining the council for Milwaukee’s SSND. She was elected the local leader in 2005, serving a special six-year term during the merger of provinces around the country and beyond into the reconfigured Central Pacific Province, which became official in 2011. At that time, Milwaukee’s SSND alone had 382 sisters.
“[Now] our province is about one-third of the number of sisters in the whole congregation. There’s about 709 of us now, our province goes from Ohio to California, North Dakota to Texas, plus Guam and Japan,” Sciano says. As provincial leader, she works with a council that includes five other sisters from Missouri, Minnesota and Texas.
Sciano became the Central Pacific Province’s second leader in 2019 and was re-elected to a second term earlier this year. Being provincial leader across such a large area leads to a diverse workload with a lot of travel. She attends to business and administrative tasks but says “the main role is spiritual leadership.”
Over the course of two months this fall, Sciano traveled to St. Louis to oversee arrangements for selling a SSND property there, visited sisters in Mankato, Minnesota, then flew out for a monthlong trip to Rome to attend meetings of the General Chapter, a sort of UN-style assembly of sisters from around the world.
Early in Sciano’s first term leading the Central Pacific Province, she would need to use every ounce of problem-solving ability she had amassed over the previous decades. In late 2020, COVID-19 reached the SSND’s elderly population. In one week, eight sisters at the Elm Grove campus died.
Sciano describes it as an extremely difficult time – the leader of the ailing sisters couldn’t enter the quarantined buildings to visit them. Even memorial services had to wait. Adding to the stress, the story became news far beyond Milwaukee. Sciano’s office was flooded with requests from reporters around the world.
“It was hard enough to go through this and to not be there, but then to have it go public,” Sciano says. “There was a desire by some, not all, who wanted to make it about us not getting vaccinations or a political thing. I didn’t want that to be the message. We wanted to show we were in solidarity with so many others grieving over lives lost.”
“I worried about her so much during the COVID pandemic because of the loss of sisters and people with whom she worked,” says Draper, Sciano’s friend from her days in court. “She felt responsibility for them, and I know how much it took from her. She felt every one of them. You can’t help but worry when you know someone that compassionate and caring.”
“I say to my sisters, you sometimes don’t know the difference you make just by listening, just by showing you care. Even if I made a teeny tiny difference in the world, it was important.”
– Sister Debra Marie Sciano
The COVID tragedy came amidst another painful challenge of Sciano’s first term. SSND’s population has been diminishing for decades. Between the declining numbers and the high cost of health care for its aging population, the order has deemed many of its facilities too underutilized and expensive to maintain. Over the past few years, SSND has sold off several of its properties – most of which had belonged to the order for at least a century. Properties in St. Louis, Mankato and Chatawa, Mississippi, were all put up for sale, as was the SSND campus in Elm Grove, home to the order since Mother Caroline Friess opened a convent, orphanage and school on the property in 1859.
“I know it’s important to do it, I understand the why,” Sciano says. “But it’s still very difficult – you’re letting go of a lot of history, sacred ground.” Sciano sees one of her responsibilities as leader as “helping our sisters in this time of letting go.”
“But the other side is,” she says, “how do you create something new? That’s what we’re trying to balance.”
In the case of Elm Grove, Sciano helped imagine a new living arrangement for the sisters: the $45 million Trinity Woods housing development, completed in December 2021 on the Mount Mary campus. It features 166 independent and assisted-living apartments – shared by the sisters as well as other seniors, students of Mount Mary who are single parents, and some grad students. The students’ children are a big presence in Trinity Woods, with playgrounds on site and their own Child Development Center.
“There’s interaction all the time. Our sisters love it – it’s intergenerational, multicultural. It’s ideal for everyone involved,” Sciano says.
One of the residents is Sciano’s mentor, Sister Jacqueline, who marvels at what was accomplished at Trinity Woods. “Her ability to stick with it – I probably would have thrown my socks out a long time before that,” Buckley says of Sciano’s work on the transition. “She stuck with it, and I think it’s because of the relationships she built that helped her work her way through.”
Buckley, who was a Mount Mary staff member from 1957-75, now has an apartment in Trinity Woods’ assisted living wing. Her room, as you might expect, is humble – a neatly made single bed, a small bookshelf and dresser drawers, a chair with a knit blanket draped over it. She enjoys activities like exercise classes, book clubs and mahjong. She gets to see children “running around in their PJs in the morning,” and visit with students from Mount Mary’s nursing program who stop in to do checkups.
“It’s still a transition,” Mount Mary President Isabelle Cherney says of her new campus population. “For many, it’s been a good one – they’ve found their new home to be adequate and nice. For some, it’s been a little more difficult. I can see that – your identity is based a lot on where you live, your space, and when you’re older and have to leave, that’s not always easy.”
Sciano was there to help the sisters with the transition. Her former boss McCann, who remains a friend, admires that as the sisters got off buses at their new home, “there’s Sister Deb standing by the bus, greeting them. There’s a human touch.”
The Grapevine Continues
THE SCHOOL SISTERS OF NOTRE DAME story begins in Bavaria in 1833, when Karolina Gerhardinger founded the order. In 1847, a group of the order’s sisters traveled to the US, opening parishes in Baltimore before spreading further into North America.
Eight years later, Mother Caroline Friess established SSND’s roots in Elm Grove, buying 40 acres along Watertown Plank Road. The order built a two-story brick building that housed a convent, school and orphanage for girls, and established a small farm on the property. Mother Caroline, who led the SSND in North America until her death in 1892, is buried on the property’s cemetery.
It’s this campus that is currently being redeveloped by Mandel Group. An initial plan for apartments and a subdivision of single-family homes was met with resistance by some neighbors who expressed concerns over property values, traffic and the general size and scope of the development. In response, the project was scaled down from 340 apartments to 237.
“It’s easy to put a piece of property on an auction block, so to speak, or hire a broker and just sell to the highest bidder, but that’s something they didn’t want to do,” says Attorney Mark Cameli, who helped advise SSND on the sale. “It had to be used in a way that honored tradition and values.”
The development, named Caroline Heights, will preserve two of the historic buildings and the order’s cemetery. Mandel Group says the first tenants will be able to move in by fall 2024.
But one thing that could not be preserved was the property’s grapevines, which stretched from a parking lot to Mother Caroline’s gravesite. “We had a massive grape arbor at Elm Grove, which was really important to us as sisters. It was over 100 years old. It grew wonderful grapes and people made wine and jam,” Sister Debra Marie Sciano says.
Transplanting the vines wasn’t in the budget, but at the suggestion of her sisters, Sciano transported cuttings from the grapevines to the Trinity Woods development at Mount Mary, where they were mixed with new vines. That blend reflects the mixed generations at the new Trinity Woods facility. Sciano tapped into her inheritance for the project and named it in her parents’ honor; the William and Mary Sciano Vineyard was dedicated on Aug. 19.
WHILE THE SISTERS set up at Mount Mary, the SSND moved its offices from Elm Grove to an office building in the Milwaukee County Research Park in Tosa. It’s here that Sciano will plan the remaining three and a half years of her term as provincial leader.
“How do we continue to serve? Even in our aging, our sisters are committed to living out the mission, so how can we continue to do that and mentor others?” Sciano says.
Those who have worked with Sciano are confident she’ll be able to figure out more of those tough questions.
“If I were writing an article about her, I’d title it something like ‘the right leader at the right time,’” says Cameli. “That order does not exist in a vacuum. They are in the community at large, and they’re doing incredible work in undeserved and underrepresented communities. It takes a special person to coordinate that. That is their work.”
Tea Krulos has written MilMag profiles of horror TV hosts, a Washington Island fisherman and Milwaukee’s surfers.
