Week 45. High School. Describe your middle and/or high school. Was it a large or small student body? Is the school still in existence today? How has it changed since you went there?
I went to John Rogers High School and this first picture is how it looked when my mom went there also. She graduated in January 1933 and Rogers had opened in February of 1932, so she went three years to Hillyard High before Rogers was built.
I went to Rogers for 10th, 11, and 12th grades as 7th, 8th and 9th were in Junior High School. Rogers was four blocks from my house and over thirty years old when I was there, they had built a row of portables behind the school and I had my homeroom in one of the portables. The first floor on the front was a offices for the principal, vice principal and councelors. Second floor in middle was the library and all the rest were classrooms. The building was kind of a rectangle with the auditorium in the middle. I did not know till a long time later that there were windows in the auditorium as they were blacked out for WWII and the black was not removed till long after I was there.
Rogers was actually the smallest of the five high schools in Spokane when I was there but we had about 1800 students most in the top three grades, but it did have a few freshmen as not all the grade schools were close to a junior high school.
In 2005 they started a remodel of Rogers, they removed most of the portables, the band room, cafeteria, the east wing, the old gym and the field house, leaving just the old three story building, and to that they added a two story addition on the south side which includes a common area, more classrooms and two of the biggest gyms I have ever seen. During the remodel the students went to the old building. When the new part was finished they moved the students to the new part and started a complete remodel of the old building (except the auditorium which had been remodeled just a few years before). Part of the money came from the historic preservation fund and so the north side which was the original front is exactly the same as in 1932 except that they replaced all the windows with newer energy efficient windows.
This last picture was from the dedication on September 12, 2009, you can see the old building on the right, and the library is the big curved window facing east, just below the library is the offices, and to the right is one of the gyms. Out in the parking lot is a new clock tower, and it has a purple ribbon on it ready for the ribbon cutting. Rogers colors were purple and gold.
Today they have four grades back in high schools and Rogers is still one of the smallest with around 1000 students there now, but room for more.
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