Uni is old… 100 years old!

Uni High is in preparation to celebrate its 100th year as a high school. The Century Celebration itself will occur next year on October 15th, 2022, but the preparations have already begun.

The Century Celebration was originally scheduled for October 9th of this year, but due to COVID concerns, the decision to postpone the celebration a year was made early this year. Instead, the Century Celebration Kickoff was launched on October 9th, and it was live-streamed on the Uni High Youtube channel. A link to the livestream replay can be found here.

Janet Kroencke, the Chief Advancement Officer at Uni High, is one of the many people responsible for planning the Century Celebration. Kroencke was able to provide insight into what the celebration will entail, as well as what comes next.

Kroencke spoke about how preparations are mainly focused on outreach to engage both the past and present Uni community. The preparations are divided into three main teams: messaging (in charge of communications), programming (plans the schedule for the event itself), and fundraising (raising money).

Fundraising is a substantial aspect of the Century Celebration, with a goal to reach 4 million dollars by the celebration next year. As it stands, 1.7 million dollars have already been donated. Kroencke detailed how the money will be spent among 5 main areas to support the Uni community: innovations in learning, building maintenance, supporting equity amongst students, supporting teachers, and a reserve for emerging needs. Kroencke described the overall goal of the fundraiser as “to build and strengthen Uni for the next 100 years”.

For the celebration itself, activities are being planned between Oct. 12 and Oct. 16, 2022, with the main gala falling on Saturday, Oct. 15. Although the details are still being planned, a large part of the event will be an opportunity for alumni to reconnect with each other, as well as for current students to network with them as well.

In addition to these preparations, Uni High’s World Wide Web class is working to create a “Class of the Century” webpage to highlight the lives of some of the most accomplished Uni alumni. Alumni were selected through a nomination process filled out by alums, and then the alumni association board proceeded to select the 100 most notable alumni.

Kroencke emphasized how the selection process included “our Uni voice, our community, our alums”. In addition, Kroencke described the goal of the Class of the Century page to recognize “who left with those Uni values, and who really took it to the next level”.

Andrew Lin, a member of the World Wide Web class, described the process of creating pages for these alumni. After being given a list of alumni to make pages for, Lin and other students choose individual alumni and use past yearbooks and online resources to research each person. All the information is then arranged into individual web pages that will be made public upon completion.

The Century Celebration is set for October 15, 2022, and the goal is to have as many alumni as possible attend. Keep your eye out as more details for the event are released throughout the year!