Digging up history
School building turns 50, time capsule to be opened
February 11, 2022
Celebrating 50 years of being open, the school will be holding a ceremony dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the building, which will be held on May 1.
“It’s a milestone,” career academies consultant and former Bryan High teacher of 32 years Krystal Kolb said. “We’ve missed other milestones at the 50-year mark, when Bryan first opened in 1964 at the middle school, we missed the milestone of the 50th graduating class and with COVID, we wanted to do something positive, something exciting for the community.”
The ceremony itself will be a rededication of the building. Speeches will be made and there will be music and snacks available for attendees.
“It’s a big landmark, and it’s something we don’t celebrate enough, our history and the things that make Bryan special and how many years of traditions and wonderful people who have passed through these doors,” curriculum specialist Kathryn McWilliams said, who’s been a Bear for 20 years.
They will also be excavating a time capsule that was buried in 1993 on the 25th anniversary of the building opening. A new one is planned to be made and buried during the ceremony, but the school has run into some problems. When it was buried, the capsule was encased in concrete and buried two feet deep to deter kids from trying to dig it up.
“Our thought was we would just be able to pop the lid off, take the old one out, do our new one, put it into the same location, but that’s not going to happen now,” Kolb said.
The estimation for unearthing the old time capsule and burying a new one is sitting at around $2,000. The school has not decided yet who will be able to put stuff in the new time capsule or what’s going in there.
“We’ve been doing some meetings, and our goal is to have student’s input, social media input, so it’s not just us deciding,” Kolb said.
Current and past students will be allowed to attend the 50th anniversary ceremony and time capsule excavation.
“I believe this is a really cool idea, because it is bringing together today’s students and the students that attended Bryan High 50 years ago,” senior Maddison Brown said.
The capsule was originally planned to be opened for the 50th anniversary of school opening in 2018, but to have more people involved, it was decided to wait until the building’s 50th year to open it.
