It promises to be a night to remember, with past students being invited to turn back the clock and roll back the years by dandering around the exterior of the school, walking down the corridors, returning to the classrooms in which they once shone - or perhaps didn’t! - sitting at the desks they occupied in years gone by and viewing photographs and the registers of the days when they were bright-eyed young things.

In short, relive your memories of school from whatever time slot you belong in the Church Road school’s half-century.

Post-party, you can even arrange to have your school reports forwarded to you, for believe it or not the archives contain the records of all of what was written about you or forecast for you!

Archie McCann was one of the first pupils to pass through the gates of Killicomaine Intermediate School as it was when it opened in January, 1958. That was the second big education event in the town in a short period for just four months earlier, the then-new Clounagh Intermediate School had admitted its inaugural in-take of pupils.

“I’ve never forgotten that morning in January 1958,” Archie said. “The skies were blue and although it was cold the sun was shining. I still remember making my way down the hill to the front door and wondering what it was going to be like.

“I’d been at Church Street Primary School, so this was something totally new and different. I’d never heard of a timetable, for example. When I heard them talking about a double period I hadn’t a clue what that was.”

He added, “I lived in Woodside Green and because I did I was on the Killicomaine side of the line. All of my friends from Church Street lived on the Clounagh side, so that’s where they’d gone. That left me feeling very much on my own.

“I didn’t know anybody and here I was, going to the big new school that was just opening for the first time. We’d no uniform and no school badge - those came later when the pupils had a chance to contribute to their design.

“So the whole thing was a huge culture shock to all of us. Looking back, I suppose I just assumed that the teachers and principal knew what was what. But with the benefit of half-a-century of hindsight I suppose it has to be said that they were all very young, too. The school was new - as indeed was the whole concept of this sort of education - to all of us, teachers and pupils alike.

“I remember us trying to get to grips with the idea of different teachers for every subject and having to move to a different classroom at the end of every period. Totally alien, that. Trying to figure out where to go in a brand new building was another thing we had to deal with. There wasn’t much point in asking anybody else; none of us knew!”

He recalls inaugural headmaster, Mr David Riley, as having been “a strict disciplinarian who took no prisoners and put up with no nonsense”.

“But it worked,” he stressed. “We knew where we stood with him.