Good Shepherd Lutheran School
parochial school in Inglewood, California, United States
Good Shepherd Lutheran School was a parochial school in Inglewood, California, affiliated with the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (LCMS), Pacific Southwest District (LCMS). The school opened on February 10, 1936, and closed on June 12, 2003. It had a history of 67 years as an institution.
History
"The Good Shepherd" is a metaphor which refers to Jesus as the shepherd who laid down His life to save His flock. Good Shepherd School was founded as a mission institution of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in the middle of the 1935-1936 academic year. Classes were held in a house on Spruce Street which doubled as the church sanctuary. Walter A. Uffelman (1912–1982), a 24-year-old LCMS schoolteacher, was called to serve as the school's first principal. He came from his native Nebraska by rail to Los Angeles County to assume his new position, accompanied by his wife, Luella (1913–1999), who served later as the kindergarten teacher of long standing as the school's size expanded. The initial enrollment of pupils in the school, coming in the middle of the academic year, amounted to just nine children; and Uffelman doubled as their teacher. Uffelman was both the first and longest-serving principal of Good Shepherd School, working as the administrator for 41 years until he reached retirement age in 1977.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Good Shepherd Lutheran School” is parochial school in Inglewood, California, United States. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Good, Shepherd and Lutheran, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “parochial school in Inglewood, California, United States” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5582945. Authority coordinates are 33.952, -118.354. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1936, 2003, 1935 and 1912.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Good Shepherd Lutheran School”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Good Shepherd Lutheran School primary sources, Good Shepherd Lutheran School archive and Good research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Good Shepherd Lutheran School”?
- What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
- Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Good Shepherd Lutheran School” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.