The Pima Gazette Evolution
What Happened to the Pima Central Newspaper?!
I’ve written previously about the Pima Central High School and their newspaper
You can find a larger write up of the school and it’s history at the link above - but TL;DR:
The school took the place of the Pima Boarding School - it opened officially sometime ~1934 or so and had the first High School in the Community.
The Pima Central School itself lasted until ~1970 and served K-8 until it was phased out for the Sacaton Public School District. But the High School was pretty short lived.
The High School only lasted from ~1934-1947 or so. After WWII it was pretty difficult to get the classes back to normal and get folks back in school. The BIA Administrator at the time, AE Robinson, decided it was easier to just bus all the high schoolers to nearby public schools and as far as I can tell by ~1950 the classrooms transitioned to only elementary and middle school.
Well, a new wrinkle in this story - I just found this really cool report that talks more about the Pima Central School and we get an answer to what happened with the paper.
So… What Happened?!
I found this article while doing some research on local schools: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED044211.pdf
Main Quote here:
“Pima Central publishes two student newspapers.
The earliest edition was the Pima Gazette which was comprised of news on grades one through six. The articles written by students are about significant events in their home and school life.
The Pima Pageant succeeded the Gazette and covered the school news class by class.
Current newspapers are the Progress published by the fifth grade, and the Pima Central Times published by the sixth grade. The Times is made up of student articles about their activities and projects while the Progress is a showcase edition with articles that are mainly reprints of national news releases.”
Keep in mind this article is from ~1970 (as the school was phasing out) so the context they have for the Gazette is probably only the younger classes since the high school has been closed ~20 or so years by this point.
What is interesting is the note that there were other newspapers after the Gazette stopped - including the Pima Pageant, the Progress, and Pima Central Times.
I’d love to get a hold of these and read them.
Side note - here is a physical description of the building .. some might remember it being around where the old Tribal Recreation and Wellness Center was, near the BIA agency building today.
Physical Structure Pima Central School is built of concrete blocks. Although the building is about thirty-four years old, it appears to be in good condition.
Pima Central has seven classrooms, a library which is a single large room, a principal's office, a teachers' lounge, a coffee room, and restrooms.
Some of the classrooms are equipped with audio-visual aids. Although the library has books in the files on other Indian tribes, there are no books on the Pima culture.
There is a recently remodeled dining room separated from the school that is jointly operated and used by Pima Central and the public school in Sacaton.
To the north of the school building are five basketball courts. A baseball field is located on the east side. On the south side there is a playground with swings and slides. In addition, there is a large front yard with grass and trees and the north and south sides of Pima Central are fenced in.
Eventually the building was demolished to make room for the new District 3 Service Center and I’m pretty sad I don’t have many pictures of it. The only one I’ve found is this one by David Vestral…
If anyone has any more photos I’d love to see them!
