Thursday, Sep. 03, 2009

History, Pasco alums agree: Only 1 high school

By Ken Robertson, Herald Executive Editor

Was there ever an Ainsworth High School in Pasco?

An online reader of the Herald believes there was. And he criticized as historically inaccurate a recent Ask the Editors blog item I wrote about the start of the new school year marking the opening of a second public high school in Pasco for the first time.

“There used to be 2 High Schools in Pasco,” the reader insisted. “The other high school was Ainsworth High School. Ainsworth closed down in the 1970s. My wife’s uncle attended this school when it was in operation. It was originally a segregated high school ....”

Provocative comments, and darn interesting if true.

But after several hours of research, I’m convinced he’s wrong.

And along the way, I rediscovered an interesting story about Pasco’s schools, re-read a book I’d almost forgotten and chatted with a wonderful group of longtime Pasco residents about their city, its schools and Franklin County’s first county seat, the old railroad town of Ainsworth, which pretty much disappeared leaving not a trace.

There’s one thing the folks at the Franklin County Historical Museum especially agreed on when I asked whether Pasco had ever had a second high school before the new Chiawana High:

“An unqualified never,” said Pasco natives Marilyn Krueger, a former Pasco teacher, and Paul Sperline, who started school in Pasco in 1944. Museum Administrator Sherel Webb and former Franklin County Prosecutor Jim Rabideau — a Pasco history buff but a “newcomer” who only arrived in 1955 — also agreed.

Their memories are supported by a highly regarded local historian, the late Walter A. Oberst, and the Tri-City Herald’s archives.

But the old one-room Ainsworth school did play a role in the history of Pasco schools, according to Oberst, who wrote Railroads, Reclamation And the River, A History of Pasco. After the Northern Pacific Railroad bridge across the Snake River at the confluence of the Snake and Columbia rivers was completed in 1884, the railroad moved its shops, its work crews and most everything else upriver a couple miles to a site that railroad engineer V.C. Bogue named Pasco.

The rest of Ainsworth soon followed, Oberst’s book reports. The school board authorized moving the one-room school in the spring of 1885, and in 1887, the county seat and courthouse building also moved from Ainsworth to Pasco.

By 1898, Franklin County commissioners “vacated, set aside and annulled” essentially all the plat for Ainsworth because virtually the entire town had moved to Pasco.

After that first one-room school, there were a series of new school buildings in Pasco, but until 1909, there’s no reference to a specific building for high school students in Oberst’s book.

From 1909-22, the high school was housed on upper floors of the West Side School, which later was known as Longfellow School. Elementary school students also attended school there, from 1909-49, when the building burned and was replaced with a new Longfellow School in 1951 on the same site.

The high school moved to a new building on Third Street in 1922, which the Pasco School Board named Washington High School, according to Oberst. But by the time C.L. Booth became superintendent in 1929, “the students had torn the sign off the high school building ..., thus restoring the name ‘Pasco High School,’” Booth told Oberst in a 1969 interview.

Booth resigned in 1951 to take a job in Lewiston, but when Pasco built a new high school at the intersection of 10th Avenue and Henry Street in 1953, it retained the name Pasco High. And that building became the core for today’s greatly expanded Pasco High School.

According to Tri-City Herald files, Pasco voters rejected proposals in 1967 and 1968 to build a second high school, instead choosing to expand the existing building.

The reader’s claim that Pasco had a school that was segregated into the late 1960s and perhaps until the early 1970s also appear to have no foundation. Black athletes were among the stars on Pasco High’s athletic teams during that time.

And it was in 1957 when the federal government began forcing local school districts to desegregate their schools, starting in Little Rock, Ark., when President Eisenhower called out the National Guard.

The closest I can find to any evidence Pasco may have had a de facto segregation in one of its schools is perhaps tied to having “neighborhood” elementary schools. According to the Herald’s files, in 1964, black residents of east Pasco “complained of poor conditions and instruction” at the old Whittier School and threatened to transfer their students to other districts.

At the time, the Herald reported, Whittier had 116 black students and only 15 white students. It was closed in 1965 and its students were bused elsewhere in the district.

Superintendent Lewis Ferrari said, “Economically it was not feasible to keep the school open for 131 students.”

Could the old Whittier School, built in 1911 and then named East Side School, have been the “segregated high school” that the wife’s uncle remembers? Its mostly black student population and location — in east Pasco, much closer to the old Ainsworth townsite at the mouth of the Snake River — could have been the source of those claims. But it wasn’t a high school.

w Ken Robertson: 582-1520; krobertson@tricityherald.com

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