Alumni invited to share memories of Irving Middle School for centennial celebration
Published at
POCATELLO – Those who once attended a local middle school have been invited to come back and celebrate the school’s centennial anniversary.
Now a century old, Irving Middle School will host a centennial celebration on April 23, in the form of an open house, from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Alumni who decide to attend will have the chance to walk through the school’s halls and share memories of their time at the school with current faculty and students.
“We wanted the building to tell the story and to remind people of what it was like to be here,” said Principal Stuart Johnson.
Irving first opened in January 1925 as Irving Junior High School. While a fire in October 1938 forced its students to temporarily attend classes at Pocatello High School, as well as the basements of some nearby churches, Irving remains in the same building it was founded in, at 911 North Grave Avenue.
The school has had two big remodel projects done in its hundred years of operation, one in the 1950s and the other in the 1980s. This has led to the building having some “interesting” architectural features, the most immediately apparent one being the school’s original entrance. Instead of a doorway, its steps lead to a bench where students can sit and wait for their ride or socialize.
The project to document this school’s long history started this year, and was conducted by the yearbook committee under the guidance of its advisor, Michelle Lowry. While she and the students were originally only tasked with doing research for some specialized pages in the yearbook, they found a host of artifacts, like old building blueprints, past yearbooks and scrapbooks, and they kept going.
“We just started going through it and realized that we had a treasure trove of things, and so we just sort of ended up being over it, even though it wasn’t how it started out,” Lowry said.
Rather than be disinterested in the history, Lowry found that she could trust her students to not only get two specialized pages on the school’s history for the yearbook completed, but also plan the celebration. Even after the yearbook was complete, three students, Jaylee Johnson, Brooklyn Brown and Evie Richardson stayed on to help bring the celebration to fruition.
“They are people I can trust to get it done. They’re self-driven, and the history they’ve been learning, they’re passionate about it, so it’s really cool to see them learning about Irving and appreciating (it),” Lowry said.
People who show up to the open house will be able to not only tour the school, but they’ll be able to stop in the gym where they can learn about each decade of Irving’s existence. The students will be presenting one display per decade, full of information they’ve uncovered about the school.
What Johnson is most excited for is the chance to talk to past students and staff about their time at Irving, and seeing what new information they have to share about the school and the memories they made there.
“It’s about the experiences that they had here and really, my experience has been unique, just as theirs are unique as a student, a teacher or administrator, and so I look forward to hearing from … former students and former administrators… and just get their perspective on what it was like,” Johnson said.