NATCHEZ — Whenever Pat Carroll looks up the hill at the former Sadie V. Thompson School, she thinks about T.M. Jennings standing there, shading his eyes as he looked across the school.

“Whenever he looked at you like that, you knew you’d been caught,” Carroll said.

The catching she remembered Saturday as she stood with other Thompson classmates and alumni was when she’d decided to skip school with her boyfriend and another couple.

“I always think of Professor Jennings — there was no running away,” she said with a laugh. “The next day, we were all called to the office and suspended. There was no getting away.”

But despite memories of getting in trouble for cutting class, Carroll said she looks back fondly on her time at Thompson, and gathered with former classmates and other alumni Saturday to unveil a historical marker at the school site. The school has long been closed and the building houses a Head Start program.

Sadie V. Thompson School served as a segregated, black school before integration, and graduates and attendees from that era — integration was in 1970 — had a reunion this weekend, of which the marker unveiling was a part. Those who attended St. Francis School and Natchez College were also part of the reunion.

The marker, which is on North Union Street, reads in part, “Our treatment was second class at best, but our principals and teachers were first class in their guidance and values.”

Natchez resident Betty Sago said the reunion committee decided to do something special to remember the school this year, which is why the dedication was a part of the reunion.

“I think Thompson was a great place to be educated,” she said. “The students were disciplined, and at Thompson School, we held it as one of the highest esteems of our life.”

The Rev. Willie Minor, who as a graduate of the class of 1954 was among the first students to attend Thompson school, which opened in 1953, said he profited from attending it.

“It was a new school then, a beautiful school, and we all benefitted from it,” he said. “It was an honor to have gone to it.”