Fifty-five years after they received their diplomas, members of Sammamish High School’s original graduating class toured the new school building as a part of their reunion festivities.
A couple dozen members of the class of 1961 wandered through the halls of the new Sammamish campus, on which construction will be completed in June 2017. In addition to the many memories and feelings of nostalgia that surfaced, another sentiment was wide-felt: unfamiliarity.
“It’s very, very odd. Sort of unnerving, in a way. It’s where I went to school, but it’s not,” alumnus George White said during the Sept. 17 tour.
The original Sammamish High School campus opened in 1959 and its first senior class of roughly 180 students graduated in 1961. In comparison, the new campus — a 320,000-square-foot facility that is in the final year of a four-year construction schedule — will serve at least 1,000 students.
While Sammamish High School now teaches students coming from 53 different countries, the class of 1961 had a grand total of two students who had not been born in the United States. The language labs are gone and textbooks are being eschewed in favor of personal laptops. Even the lockers have disappeared — there’s only around 160 in the new building, because students rarely need them.
Despite the new gadgets and increased focus on technology, Sammamish alumna and retired educator Suzy Mygatt Wakefield said that modern students are remarkably similar to her generation. In the end, they want help finding the pathways to get where they want to go in their lives, she said.
“You may have noticed that the school as you know it is disappearing,” former principal Tom Duenwald told the alumni. “But in the end, this is still a local, neighborhood school.”
The group was also there to view the spot where one of the few remnants of the original building will be placed. The tile handprints they made upon graduating all those years ago will soon be installed along the front pathway as a “memory walk”.
“When we graduated, it was a momentous occasion for us. Somebody had the great idea of pouring a new stretch of fresh concrete along the library wall, that we could use to leave our hand and foot imprints for posterity. At our 50th reunion … we looked for this stretch of paving and only found it when somebody took a pressure washer to wash off all the dirt and debris to expose the paving beautiful as the day after it was first poured,” Sammamish alumnus and reunion coordinator Ekhard Preikschat said. “When we planned our 55th reunion, we first visited the new school and were taken aback by the fact that most of the old school had been demolished and hauled away, including (we thought) our paving of handprints. On a later visit, I discovered that somebody had the foresight to save the paving carefully stacked on pallets behind a security fence. We were elated.”
A few other touches of the past remain, including a glass case of historic gadgets in the atrium and portions of the original gymnasium, which will likely be used in an art piece near the front entrance. The Totems mascot that the class of 1961 chose also still represents Sammamish today.
Former Sammamish teacher Sharon Guske joined the tour group last weekend and said she was amazed by the changes she saw, though she said she felt like a foreigner.
But, not everyone was impressed by the changes.
“There’s no warmth, it’s all glass and steel. Where’s the desks with kids names scratched into them?” alumna Allyn Morse said, adding that the $125 million budget for the building was “appalling”.
Alumnus Rick Sternoff said that he never could have envisioned something like the new campus, especially because he thought the original campus was first-rate.
“That’s one of those things you learn as you get older. Things are always getting bigger and better,” he said.
