Jun. 7—ROCHESTER — By the time Tiffany Piotrowicz was a freshman at John Marshall High School in 1996, she knew that wasn’t the school she would graduate from.
Even as a freshman, she wasn’t spending her whole day at JM. The city’s schools were overcrowded, and the district was using the building that would later become Friedell Middle School for overflow capacity.
That meant there was a lot of bus time for the students, who were spending half their day at Friedell and the other half at one of the two high schools. The district would bus one group of students to Friedell in the morning, and then return them to the high schools and bus another group of students to Friedell for the afternoon.
Meanwhile, the district was building a brand new school on top of the hill in northeast Rochester. That’s where Piotrowicz would go starting her sophomore year. She was on her way to becoming one of the first students to walk the halls of Century High School, where she would ultimately graduate from on June 7, 2000.
Now, a quarter-century after the school’s inaugural graduating class accepted their diplomas, former students and teachers alike remember it being a unique experience — a chance to help set the stage for what would come thereafter at Rochester’s third mainstream public high school.
“We had a completely different experience from any other high school,” Piotrowicz said. “We got to pick our mascot and our school colors and the fight song. So, I think everybody knew going into it that this was going to be unique and that we were going to be setting the tone … for what was going to happen for years to come.”
Although leaders had been talking about the new school for years beforehand, it became a reality when voters approved a bond levy of $37.3 million in 1996.
At the time, there was controversy about the school’s name. The Rochester School Board approved “Century” with a 4-3 vote after turning down the option of “Eleanor Roosevelt High School” by a vote with the same margin. At the time, Carol Carryer said she’d “never had an issue generate this many phone calls, letters and conversations on the street” in her six years on the board.
The school first opened its doors to students in the fall of 1997. Even though it was still under construction, it was far enough along that the district began phasing students into the building. That first year, only freshmen and sophomores attended the school. Those sophomores from 1997-98 went on to become the first graduating class of 2000.
By all accounts, it was an odd first year, which the inaugural class noted themselves in their 2000 yearbook.
“The first day of school September 2, 1997, at Century was a day neither the students nor the city will ever forget,” the yearbook reads. “It was the beginning of a frustrating year. With no traditions, no seniors, and an unfinished building, students, staff and administrators had to work hard to make the school year flow smoothly.”
There was no gym, no auditorium, and they were using one of the science labs as a kitchen. The multi-purpose room in the center of the school, known as the forum, became the place for a multitude of needs: dances, daily lunch hours, band practices, etc.
Only about half of the classrooms were ready enough to use, and those that were available had their own issues. The school was designed with “double classrooms” that could be separated into two with dividers. But at the start of the 1997-98 year, they hadn’t yet arrived.
“Century’s double classrooms don’t yet have their dividers,” a Post-Bulletin article from 1997 reads. “That means teachers who expected to have their own classrooms now have to either team-teach with the teacher on the other side of the room, or speak quietly so they don’t interfere with each other’s classes.”
Century history teacher Vic Robinson recalls stacking a wall of boxes to act as a barrier between the two halves.
Jean Marvin is a current Rochester School Board member and a retired Century English teacher. She remembers how there would be times when she would ask a question, and a student in the other class on the other side of the room would answer it.
One of the students from the inaugural graduating class, Eric Applen, described the school as having a “new car smell.” And even though he was a sophomore that first year, he said there was an excitement about knowing his class would be the first to graduate from the building three years later.
There would continue to be some bumps along the road beyond the first year. One of those was concerning the scheduling of the city’s schools. When it first opened, Century was on what’s known as the block schedule, meaning there were four extended periods throughout the day.
Controversy about that between the district and the teachers’ union, however, led to an arbitration ruling that reversed the schedule and established a seven-period day.
There were also changes with the school’s leadership. Century’s first principal retired in January 1999. The district then hired an interim principal until Chuck Briscoe took the role the summer of 1999 — becoming the third principal in less than two years.
Briscoe went on to serve for more than a decade at the school. And although he wasn’t the building’s first principal, he still remembers the excitement of getting to help shape its future.
“It was almost like we were working with a blank sheet of paper,” Briscoe said. “It was a perfect blend of great teachers, students who were open to try different things, and very supportive families.”
Marvin reiterated that, describing how collaboratively the staff worked together at the time.
“We really, really worked as a team to get things done — to work with the kids as we invented who we were going to be,” Marvin said. “As we changed administration during those first few years, it really wasn’t a disruption in how we did things. It was an incredibly strong staff because it sort of had to be.”
Now, more than 25 years removed from those first days at Century, the students of the time are spread across the map. Piotrowicz is the owner of the Rochester business TerraLoco. Applen previously worked as a teacher in several of Rochester’s schools and has been in the U.S. Air Force for 25 years. He now works at the Air National Guard in Washington, D.C.
Although Century’s current principal, Patrick Breen, didn’t grow up in Rochester, Briscoe’s signature is still on his high school diploma. Prior to becoming Century’s first principal to serve a longer stint in 1999, Briscoe had been a high school principal in Willmar, Minnesota, where Breen graduated from.
School life for seniors at the time was very different from what it is for students today. There were no smartphones or social media. They were already juniors when Google came online in 1998. They were also seniors during the Y2K scare of 2000.
However, more than the turn of the century and the millennium, the historical event that stands out most for Piotrowicz was the Columbine school shooting on April 20, 1999.
She remembers a group gathering around a TV in one of the administrators’ offices to watch the coverage. Although it was happening several states away, she remembers noticing the similarities between her own school and the one on the screen. Both had the school colors of blue and gray. Both schools had the initials CHS.
Although Columbine would later become known as the start of a crisis endemic to American schools, it was a singular, tragic event at the time — one that multiple people at Century recall happening.
“I don’t know if anyone thought of it as something that could happen to us as much as they thought ‘how could that happen to anybody?'” Robinson said.
One memory that has collectively stuck in the minds of many from that era was Century’s first football victory against Mayo High School on Sept. 17, 1999.
During the school’s first football season the year before, the team had scored a dismal 303-31 in a 0-9 season. Without any seniors on the team, they had been “out-numbered and out-sized each time they took the field in the strong Big 9 Conference,” Post Bulletin sports reporter Donny Henn wrote at the time.
But that Friday night in September 1999, they took their first victory as a team, besting their Mayo rivals with a 16-7 win on the school’s home field.
“Call it the game of the Century,” Henn wrote. “It might not be too much hyperbole. Eleven months ago, Mayo pulverized the Panthers 58-0.”
There were an estimated 3,000 people at the game, overflowing the stadium. Applen remembers students rushing onto the field at the end of the game, and even trying to climb up onto the goal posts. Briscoe remembers that too.
Tyler Bowman, who was the student government president for his last three years of high school, described it as one of the moments when the school came into its own.
“We’d started building traditions and setting ourselves apart from John Marshall and Mayo, but it wasn’t until the fall of 1999 that our football team won our first football game,” Bowman said. “I talked about it quite a bit in my graduation speech in 2000 because it was kind of the crowning moment of us feeling like we were a real high school.”
Later that same year, the school’s inaugural class donned their caps and gowns for graduation. At the time, the ceremony was held in the school’s football stadium — the same space that had brought the school together for its first win against Mayo at the start of their senior year.
That memory is something that still sticks out for Chuck Handlon, who was a chemistry teacher among the school’s charter staff that opened the school in 1997.
“I will never forget that first graduating class on the football field,” Handlon said, “hearing the clapping, and looking at the bleachers with all these parents and family members. Century’s very first class. They were so excited.”