Sixty years later, graduates return to a different, but similar, East High School
They walked the halls they once walked, had breakfast snacks in the commons room where they once danced the slide and the twist. They gathered in the huge auditorium to hear words from the school principal, as they often did.
Now, 78 years old or thereabouts, the members of the East High School Class of 1964, back for their 60th reunion a few days ago, were touring the building they had helped inaugurate as eighth graders in September 1959.
The tour had a family feel, as it was led by Ed Mascadri, the principal of East’s Upper School, grades 10 through 12. He’s the son of Ed Mascadri, East High Class of 1964. The elder Mascadri, a retired Hilton School District principal, was along on the tour, asking questions like everyone else.
When the elder Mascadri and his classmates arrived at East, the building wasn’t quite finished, but it was in good enough shape to accept students.
East High built for Baby Boomer generation
The structure on East Main Street was a response to an enrollment wave in the Rochester City School District, and the class of 1964 was at the head of the wave, as most of them were born in 1946, the first year of the Baby Boom.
The class was large — 500 or so would graduate, and it took a while for students to get their bearings.
"To this day I can still have dreams of going down the long hallways looking for my classrooms,” Janice Aspridy Corea of the Class of 1964 said.
Eventually, she and others settled in. They discovered subjects they loved, found friends for a lifetime.
Class of 1964 comes home
JooEe Ong, who attended East as an exchange student from Malaysia, traveled to the reunion from Singapore with her husband. Asked what brought her back to Rochester, she quickly answered: “My friends. I came here to see my friends.”
Gene Duffey, a former sports reporter at the Rochester Times-Union came from Houston. Gary Rivoli was there from his home in Louisville, Kentucky.
Rivoli went to Monroe Community College after graduating from East. He worked a little after that, but then talked with a counselor at East who suggested he go to the University of Louisville.
He did just that, becoming an engineer and, later, a professor at the university. He owes a lot to East. “The teachers, the advisers, were in touch with us, they knew who we were,” he said.
His friends knew who he was, as well. “He was the class clown,” one suggested. Rivoli didn’t object to the label.
East high is a changed place
The younger Mascadri made clear to the alumni how the school has changed. “We’re serving kids differently,” he stressed.
In 2014, East was endangered, failing in the eyes of the state. The school district then formed a partnership with the University of Rochester that changed the nature and status of the school.
East has its own superintendent, and it has more money than other schools. There are more counselors, more programs, more innovation. There are higher salaries, but longer days, for teachers and staff. The result has been a marked improvement in attendance and in graduation rates.
Nevertheless, the arrangement with UR is scheduled to end at the finish of the 2025 school year. The alumni on the tour wondered why something that seemed to be working would be abandoned. Mascadri suggested the answer was complicated, mixed up in “bureaucracy, money, and politics.”
East is designed to support the community
That question aside, it was easy to see the changes at East. As one of the district’s community schools, it offers a variety of services. There’s a food pantry, a barbershop. Dental care.
There’s a program in the culinary arts, and there’s a program that trains students to make eyeglasses that are then fitted, for free, to students from across the district. (Mascadri’s glasses are student-made.)
There’s a health sciences program, where students train to become phlebotomists, drawing blood from their teachers as practice. (Teachers aren’t required to do that, Mascadri allowed.).
But what about languages? Is Latin gone? Yes. Is French gone? Yes. But Spanish remains. And American Sign Language has been added.
More languages, far more languages, are spoken at East now, given the number of students who have arrived from other countries.
One graduating senior at the school, Amadou Nabe, speaks several languages. He’s a success story, and so are a lot of other students at East. The graduating seniors have received almost $2 million in scholarships, Mascadri noted.
There are fewer students in the high school now, about 700, grades 9 through 12. Another 300 are in the Lower School, grades 6, 7 and 8. In 1964, there were probably 2,000 in East’s High School alone.
But enrollment is down throughout the district, indeed throughout the area.
Reflecting changes in the city, the demographics at the school have changed since 1964, when most of the students were white. Now, the majority are Black or African American, or Hispanic or Latino.
Rochester has changed, but East's mission hasn't
There’s something at the entryway that wasn’t there 60 years ago, a scanner like those at airport security. It’s there, in part, to keep weapons out, to make sure the violence that has plagued the city doesn’t get inside the school.
“We have kids who have had to deal with murders in their homes,” Mascadri said. “I’ve gone to more funerals to support kids who have lost their parents.”
That’s a hard fact to absorb, but the alumni balance it with all the evidence that the school they attended is doing what it can, helping students navigate a challenging world.
Looking back, that’s what teachers did when East High was brand new, and students walked the halls and formed the friendships that called them back to the school they came to love.
From his home in Geneseo, Livingston County, retired senior editor Jim Memmott writes Remarkable Rochester about who we were, who we are. He can be reached at jmemmott@gannett.com or write Box 274, Geneseo, NY 14454.
This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: East High Class of 1964 finds things have changed at old school
