Classrooms, Campuses, and Community: Piedmont School History on Foot

Our Piedmont Recreation Department’s Walking on Wednesdays group says it never rains on Wednesday mornings in Piedmont, but there was a “very heavy mist” last Wednesday morning. It and this being New Year’s Eve reduced the group’s size. Eighteen water-resistant walkers and two of our K-9 best friends were on hand at the Exedra at our regular weekly gathering time.

The Piedmont schools were still on their Holiday break and their campuses were open. Piedmont High, Piedmont Middle School, Millennium High School, and Havens Elementary were all in close proximity and a safe, short walk on a wet morning.

Before we got started walking, some background school information was provided. The City of Piedmont was incorporated in September 1907. Since its population was growing dramatically after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, city leaders decided to build two schools to serve the community. The first school was built in 1910 and opened its doors in 1911. It was originally named “The Bonita Avenue School,” but was later renamed “Frank C. Havens Elementary School” after the land donor. It turned out that Havens would be part of the high school’s history too.

We started off going behind the Exedra to a path along the top of the park that is a back, side entrance to the high school. We entered the campus and walked down a breezeway to covered area and some more PHS history was shared.

In 1916 Havens was in big financial trouble. The Oakland Tribune reported lawsuits totaling $90,000 were filed against him. He had only a little land left from his fortune and it was in his wife's name. The Anglo-California Trust Company held the mortgage on the Piedmont Park for $172,000, and neither the interest nor the principal had been paid. Havens had auctioned off his art collection and wanted to sell the park to raise funds.

The Piedmont School Board voted to purchase some of the park for a new high school and athletic field. They wanted thirteen acres, but Havens would not sell less than the park’s entire twenty-seven acres. The City wanted to save the park from residential development but did not have money to purchase the remaining parkland, and in 1916 Piedmont voters defeated a measure to raise funds to buy the land.

Havens died suddenly in 1918 from food poisoning. The parkland was still available in 1921 when Piedmont philanthropist Wallace Alexander and others offered to purchase fourteen acres of the park in 1921 if the City would reimburse them, which it did in 1922 after a bond issue was approved by voters. This plan allowed the school district to buy the thirteen acres it wanted and the City to have its park.

Construction began immediately in 1921 on the high school. It was a reinforced concrete building with terra cotta trim for five hundred students. An auditorium spanned the front of the school with two stories of classrooms behind and two wings held more classrooms. Piedmont Junior High School and the athletic field were added in 1924, and other additions were built in 1937 and 1939.

In 1974, the original school building was declared unsafe under state earthquake laws and was demolished. However, the demolition took longer than anticipated because the buildings were so well built that it was difficult to tear them down. Three new classroom buildings and a gymnasium were built, and the original library, quad, and administration buildings were rehabilitated.

The new construction was done in the "back-to-nature" style that was then popular with a wood exterior. However, by the mid-2010s this construction was also deemed earthquake unsafe and these buildings had to be demolished too. The school was reconstructed and opened in the fall of 2021 with a new STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics) building and a new theater after voters approved $56 million in bonds.

Some more interesting facts were also shared. PHS girls were required to wear middy blouses and pleated skirts until the early 1960s. It was the last public school in California to resist pressure from the State to stop enforcing a dress code which required students, and specifically girls, to wear a uniform.

We admired the quad area in front of the Student Center and took a group photo. Then we walked over to Millenium High School (MHS) and talked about it. The school was officially started in 2000 and named for the new millennium. It evolved from the school district's previous alternative program, the Piedmont Independent Learning High School, that had opened in 1980.

MHS has a small enrollment, usually around sixty students in grades 9 to 12. Classes are small, with about 10 to 20 students per class. A fun fact is that George Lucas, the creator of the Star Wars films, granted the school the right to use the image of the Millennium Falcon on a school sweatshirt, as well as to represent the school as its mascot, effectively creating the Millennium (High School) Falcon.

Next to Millennium is the middle school. In the late 1960s the then “Piedmont Junior High School” became a separate entity from the high school. However, like the high school, its building was considered unsafe in an earthquake and was also torn down in 1974.

A new Piedmont Junior High School was built and opened in 1975. It was built down Magnolia Avenue largely on what was once the site of the Jasaitis family’s home. An iron fence that is still below the middle school was part of their property and its tea house was moved to up Piedmont Park where it is today. The school initially served grades 7 through 9. In 1978 the school officially took on its current Piedmont Middle School name and transitioned to a middle school format serving grades 6 through 8.

We exited the campus and went up Hillside and Vista Avenues to Bonita Avenue and Havens School. The 1910 school was expanded under the New Deal in the 1930s. There had been three previous efforts to replace temporary school buildings in Piedmont in the 1920s because about one-third of Piedmont students were being taught in buildings that were derisively called “shacks” by the locals. However, all the school bond votes lost.

After the school board gained a promise of funding from the Depression’s Public Works Administration (PWA) in 1933, a new bond issue passed that year. A new five-classroom wing and an auditorium were built in 1937-38 on the eastern edge of the school grounds and an auditorium, named in honor of Ellen Driscoll, the school’s first principal who taught at the school for 20 years, was added in 1940-42.

A new Havens School building was built at the same school site in 1955. The 1910 school, which faced Bonita Avenue, was torn down. The new school held a kindergarten, eleven new classrooms, library, cafeteria, and administration wing. The New Deal classrooms and auditorium in the back remained, but in 2010, the 1938 classrooms were demolished and the school was rebuilt.

We found a gate to the school’s turf playground. We walked through it, went past classrooms, and exited through a gate on Oakland Avenue. We made our way back to the Exedra going down Highland, Vista, Bonita Avenues to Magnolia for one more look of the historic Piedmont High School.