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Jenna & Alexandra

The History of Sentinel


This month, Sentinel’s yearbook team dug up a frankly overwhelming amount of yearbooks from years past, and we decided to sell them in the foyer to students who may be interested in how Sentinel’s student culture has changed throughout the years. These yearbooks date all the way back to the early 1960s, and are full of compelling anecdotes about our school’s past!


But these fascinating relics of our school and all of its history were all locked away in a storage room, and though there are a select few available for viewing in the library’s student mezz, it still seems that most of us students don’t know much about how our school came to be and how student culture has evolved over the years. So, take a quick break from your studying, and journey back to 1963, the year that Sentinel Secondary School was founded.

High school student culture is something that is constantly changing; it responds to trends in the media, social customs, and new inventions that impact the way we communicate with each other. But a quick look through the 1986-1987 Sentinel yearbook shows that popular culture seems to have come full circle in the last 30 years. TV shows, films, and music that students love today for their vintage styles were just emerging 33 years ago. The grad class of ‘87 mentioned their love for these things because they were new and trendy at that time, with no knowledge of how popular they would be in the future for entirely different reasons. For example…

“[an ‘87 grad] enjoys watching sitcoms, listening to the Rolling Stones, Talking Heads, and reading Wild Summer.

Duran Duran is [an ‘87 grad’s] favourite musical group.”

“When not glued to ‘Roadrunner’ reruns, [an ‘87 grad] could be found listening to Simon and Garfunkel or mulling over Romeo and Juliet.”

“[an ‘87 grad] can be found listening to anything but the Top 40.” (apparently, the tendency of certain students to reject the most popular music is not a recent occurrence!)

The same can also be said for fashion trends today! What the students of ‘87 loved to wear went from being cool at the time, to being considered ugly upon the emergence of 2000s fashion, to finally being in style again. Baggy sweatshirts layered over collared shirts, high-waisted jeans, varsity jackets, tartan pattern. and windbreakers are found on all the students in the 1986-1987 yearbook, and the same could be said for the hallways in 2019, though to a lesser extent. Below are a few photos of students’ outfits taken from this yearbook.


These yearbooks may just be a collection of photos and text, and it may just seem like fiction to us, but it can be interesting to take some time to consider the students who came before us when you walk through the hallways. These hallways, and Sentinel Secondary School as a name, has seen so much of modern history that we study in its very classrooms today. Students who walked these hallways in 1963 witnessed the Kennedy assassination being broadcasted worldwide. The students of 1969 must have talked endlessly in our very own hallways about Neil Armstrong’s “recent” moon landing. And the students of 1989 saw, on their news stations, the fall of the Berlin Wall. These hallways that we are all so familiar with have seen it all, and there is still so much to see in the near and distant future.

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