BAGUIO CITY—A box full of memorabilia helped provide insight into the evolution of this city’s biggest high school, which turned a century old in the same week that the 2016 school term opened.
The centennial of the Baguio City National High School
(BCNHS) was celebrated Thursday, making it one of the surviving pioneer institutions created when the American colonial government introduced the public education system at the start of the 20th century.
The school helped shape the educated Cordillerans, many of whom became the region’s first teachers, doctors, lawyers and engineers when it was established as the Mountain Province High School (MP High) in 1916, said Paul Fianza, who researched on the school history for the 2000 alumni homecoming souvenir booklet.
Fianza pored through recollections of alumni, Cordillera archives and old souvenir programs dating back to the 1970s. The materials, tucked in a box at Fianza’s home, were donated by alumni members who hungered for a definitive history of their school.
The school stands on land which Baguio Ibaloy called “Andebok,” said Erlyn Ruth Alcantara, curator of the gallery at Maryknoll Ecological Sanctuary here.
She said Andebok was a farm tended by Otto Scheerer, whom she described as “the lone foreign resident at the time the United States Philippine Commission’s first exploratory party arrived in Baguio.”
“This area was later called ‘Governor’s Hill,’ after it became Benguet Gov. William Pack’s office and residence,” she said.
The BCNHS may be much older based on some accounts about an earlier industrial school set up by the Thomasites before it became the MP High. The Thomasites were the 500 American teachers sent to the Philippines aboard the ship USS Thomas in 1901 to establish the public school system.
MP High was housed at the Teachers’ Camp and later in Casa Vallejo, the city’s oldest hotel, before it settled at Andebok. The students who graduated in 1956 were the first occupants of the current school site.
The Baguio government began to operate MP High in the 1920s. The school was soon renamed the Baguio City High School.
Until the 1970s, students paid their tuition at City Hall before they took their periodic exams. That was the time the school formed its science class composed of 28 pupils, whose allowances were subsidized by alumni who graduated in the 1950s, said Fianza, a member of Class 1975.
“The school season followed the American schedule so the first classes in 1916 began in September, not June,” he said.
The school also offered vocational subjects for students who wanted to work instead of enter college, Fianza said. It is a curricular system being restored by the senior high school program that BCNHS opened on June 13.
The origin of BCNHS is tied to the development of the former La Trinidad Farm School, the precursor of the Benguet State University which will also celebrate its centennial in September.