From 1919 to 1973, Brothers of the Christian Schools with their Provincial Offices in Toronto provided Catholic high school education to young men in Yorkton. Completing the complex of buildings - an eastern-rite Redemptorist monastery, St. Mary's Ukrainian Catholic Church, and Sacred Heart Academy for elementary children and high school girls under the Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate - St. Joseph's College was intended for Ukrainian Catholic boys. While laymen were sometimes employed as teachers beginning in 1920, they were the exception until 1963, when the College offered university-level courses in affiliation with the University of Saskatchewan. Sisters had taken care of the kitchens beginning in 1929, and began teaching regularly in 1968. Laywomen teachers entered the school in 1972. With declining enrolments for a private Catholic boarding school, the school became a co-educational junior high school jointly operated by the Catholic and the public school systems in 1973, but closed in 1979. The buildings were demolished in 2004.
Paul Laverdure