History
Walter Johnson High School was founded in 1956 as part of the Montgomery County Public School system (MCPS). The school is named in honor of the late Washington Senators' baseball pitcher, Walter Johnson, who resided in a Bethesda house which still stands just a few miles away from the school on Old Georgetown Road. After retiring from baseball, Walter Johnson became a county commissioner for Montgomery County.
During the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the outer suburbs of Washington were within five minutes' drive of the Beltway, Walter Johnson was viewed as a "country" or "outer-suburban" school. The school was surrounded by farms and livestock, notably cow herds. Yearbooks indicate that, although at first Walter Johnson's rival high school may have been Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, Maryland, as early as 1960 a heated rivalry arose between Walter Johnson and Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in Bethesda, which lasted several decades.
During the 1972/73 academic year, "WJ" experimented with a 90-minute mid-day "activity period" in which no formal classes were held and students were encouraged to occupy themselves voluntarily with extracurricular activities, which could include simply socializing or reading a book, as well as organized extracurricular activities. This unstructured approach to education was intended to encourage creativity and individuality. The activity period was cut back to two days a week in subsequent years, and has since been removed entirely.
Despite numerous renovations, the original building still stands. Additional wings have been added to the school on either end and classrooms have been modernized. A new cafeteria was added to the school in 2003, and a student commons area was added in 2009 as a part of a school-wide renovation which took several years. "The Clock," well-known to students, is still in working order and resides in the front hallway above the two golden plaques of the Wildcat and Spartan.
Read more about this topic: Walter Johnson High School
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“All objects, all phases of culture are alive. They have voices. They speak of their history and interrelatedness. And they are all talking at once!”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)