Happy birthday, Clovis High: You're 64

The Clovis High School complex at 21st and Thornton streets opened 64 years ago this week. Some things you might not know about the history of Clovis High:

Clovis’ first school, which contained all 12 grades, was built in 1907 on land donated by the Santa Fe Railway. It was located at Seventh and Axtell streets, about where the Clovis Area Transit System buses are housed today.

That first school, which opened in October 1907, had 13 students. By February 1908, there were 100 pupils in Clovis’ two-room schoolhouse. By 1909, a two-story, nine-room brick facility was erected to house most of the young scholars.

Victor Bieler was the first Clovis High School graduate, the only senior in the class of 1910. Beiler soon became an educator himself. When a 30-year class reunion was held in 1940, Bieler was overseeing a college in Redlands, California.

That “new school,” built in 1909 was torn down in 1919 because of safety concerns. Students said it swayed in the wind. One afternoon, the “Clovis City School” brick-and-mortar monument atop the building fell to the concrete steps in front of the main entry. Historians tell us the students were all in class and no one was injured.

The first Clovis High School opened in the fall of 1918 at Seventh and Main streets, where the city library stands today. Newspaper accounts show it cost $75,000 and featured 31 rooms and offices. It also had a large gymnasium with dressing rooms and showers.

School officials boasted the new building had one of the best heating systems in the state with a 5-horsepower fan blowing over steam-heated coils. Voters agreed to fund the high school, 286-32. The only complaint: some felt it was too far “out of town,” too far outside the heart of Clovis’ residential areas.

The high school population swelled from fewer than 200 in 1918 to nearly 1,000 by 1956, prompting the need for another new high school, the one that remains today. This latest one cost more than $600,000 to build and included “every known modern teaching facility,” the Clovis News-Journal reported. It included a business education department, a home economics department, a library, a study hall, nine additional classrooms and an administrative unit. A second unit set to open in the spring of 1957 would nearly double the number of classrooms and also feature a vocational agriculture building.

Superintendent Travis Stovall was credited with being the driving force behind the new high school and multiple other school building projects. Stovall was Clovis’ eighth superintendent, following James Bickley (1920-1945) and R.E. Marshall (1945-1954). Stovall held the job until 1964.

In addition to the new high school in 1956, the growing Clovis public school system consisted of six elementary schools, a junior high and the old high school, which was the new home for the district’s seventh graders. Faculty included 180 teachers and nine principals. Staff included 15 custodians, 12 secretaries, five maintenance men, one cafeteria manager, 26 cafeteria employees, three school bus contractors and one night watchman.

The first day of classes that year were held on Aug. 28 and the new high school was the subject of a front-page news story in the Clovis News-Journal.

Darlene Nolan, a junior, was rushed to the hospital after she accidentally ran through a glass window.

“Darlene apparently thought she was leaving through an open door as she was going to lunch,” the newspaper reported. The window was approximately the same height and width as the exit door.

The girl was badly cut on her right arm and right leg and underwent surgery for her injuries.

Norvil Howell was in his first year as a music instructor with Clovis schools in 1956, moving in from Muleshoe. He remembers the new school was still under construction when classes began, that it had no gymnasium and the high school football field was still at Marshall Junior High, which was often under water after a good rain.

Howell, whose education career spanned more than 40 years across five decades, also remembers the new Clovis High School had no paved parking lot and there were no homes nearby when it first opened.

“Some people complained it was too far out of town,” he said.

David Stevens writes about regional history for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

[email protected]