Janet Dayton’s 7th-grade classroom at Miller Jr. High School on Friday whirred with middle school chatter and shuffling posterboards.

“We’re getting close,” Dayton said. “They’re getting hyped up.”

The excited buzz wasn’t only because there would be no school the next day. Students had their minds on Sunday, Jan. 28, when some of them would, in fact, be attending the school in South Aberdeen.

On that day, Miller Jr. High School will hold a public ceremony to celebrate its 100th anniversary of existence, as well as each of the decades since the junior high school, upon its construction in 1924, became the first of its kind in Washington state.

The ceremony starts at 2 p.m. in the Miller gymnasium, and will include speeches from John Hughes, Washington State Historian and longtime editor and publisher of The Daily World, as well as Aberdeen’s new mayor, Douglas Orr, Grays Harbor College President Carli Schiffner, and Aberdeen Superintendent Jeff Thake. Washington Superintendent of Public Instruction Chris Reykdal will deliver a video message.

The school is still collecting Miller-related memorabilia, which will be displayed in the library.

But in large part, it’s the current Miller students who are responsible for exhibiting those who came before them — and setting the stage for the next 100 years.

Students in Dayton’s 7th-grade class, called AVID, which stands for Advancement Via Individual Determination, started thinking about the centennial celebration in October. Their assignment: Capture Miller Jr. High’s history, decade by decade. Dayton divided her class into small groups and assigned each to investigate a 20-year period, from the 1920s through the 2020s, to uncover and display the music, fashion, innovation and key events of the day. Dayton asked, what did kids do for fun in Aberdeen?

Luckily, the students had the help of Jerry Salstrom. Miller has been around for 100 years, and Salstrom has been around for half of them. He arrived in Aberdeen in the late 1960s as a math teacher, served as principal from 1989 to 1999, and continued teaching after that.

Salstrom, who has spearheaded much of the centennial planning effort, said he wishes the 100-year anniversary occurred 25 years ago when he was principal. At 78-years old — Friday was his birthday — he still strides the halls briskly, engaging and chatting with passing staff who he once taught in his own middle school classrooms.

In preparation for the centennial, Salstrom combed museums and libraries looking for clues to Miller’s long past. What he found was strewn about Dayton’s classroom on Friday as students prepared their displays: Dozens of articles from the Argonaut, the former student newspaper, and others from The Daily World; a 1950s yearbook with a page dedicated to the 24 pairs of twins in school that year; and a junior high school graduation certificate from the 1920s.

Student Vada Wenzel thought the certificate would be an intriguing part of her group’s display on the 1920s and 30s — a long yellow poster called “The years of jazz,” an ode to the jazz age of their assigned decade.

Keeping on theme, the group platted music notes on their poster. They transcribed the tune of the “Miller March,” the school’s fight song that Wenzel, on the trombone, and other members of the marching band will perform on Sunday.

“There’s this one part I really like,” Wenzel said.

For Anthony Ceja, whose group was assigned to the 1960s and 70s, Sunday the 28th is extra special. While his school turns 100, he will turn 13.

“It’s crazy to think that it’s already on its 100th birthday,” Ceja said.

As they compiled old photos of students with beehives and flipped bob hairstyles, the students talked about a 1960s practice in which parents would attend a school day in place of their children.

Ceja then pointed to a 1977 newspaper clipping announcing that Aberdeen voters had approved a bond for a new Miller Jr. High School. Two years later, the current school in South Aberdeen was built, and the old school on the north side was demolished.

Miller stayed a junior high — seventh, eighth and ninth grades — until 1982 before Aberdeen’s 9th graders started attending the high school. Miller remained with only seventh and eighth graders until 2019, when sixth graders moved in, and the school added an annex.

Other changes occurred during that time in between. IPads replaced encyclopedias and textbooks. Teachers were forced to adapt to technologies like smartphones that increasingly distracted kids’ attention away from lessons and toward their screens. A deadly pandemic isolated middle-schoolers from their friends for many months, their only social interaction through a laptop screen.

Those are parts of life that today’s students want to capture for generations to come. They will dedicate a time capsule on Sunday, and some of the first items are a COVID 19-era cloth mask and a magnetic sack — a Yondr pouch — for locking away cell phones during class.

Lori Snyder, whose eighth-grade AVID class is in charge of the time capsule, said on Friday the class is still looking for items to include, particularly football-related memorabilia. Synder said the time capsule will become a “living” project, with each year’s eighth grade class adding items.

“That could become a real tradition,” Salstrom said.

Snyder said her students’ preparation for the centennial began last spring, when they designed a commemorative T-shirt and helped inventory student sizes. More recently, they wrote a radio promotion for the event in both English and Spanish.

Synder said preparing for the centennial has exercised all the skills, like collaboration and research, that the AVID class emphasizes.

“The best thing I’ve experienced is watching my students grow in taking responsibility, and stepping up to be the leaders I know that they are, but they didn’t know that they were yet,” Snyder said.

Contact reporter Clayton Franke at 406-552-3917 or clayton.franke@thedailyworld.com.

Clayton Franke / The Daily World Students in Janet Dayton’s 7th grade AVID class — Advancement Via Individual Determination — work to organize their historical posters on Friday, Jan. 19. The students have worked since the beginning of the 2023 school year to prepare for the Miller Junior High centennial celebration on Sunday, Jan. 28.