School No. 4 Teachers, PTA Members Plan School’s 100th Birthday Party

Friday’s PTA-sponsored dinner dance commemorating Fort Lee School No. 4’s 100th anniversary may be sold out, but the real celebration, or at least the one that some of the school’s current teachers and students care about, is still a couple of months away.

On May 25, School No. 4 is having a 100th birthday party.

A dedicated group of teachers and PTA members have been planning exactly what the celebration will entail and what they’ll be giving the school as a “birthday gift,” meeting every two or three weeks during the teachers’ lunch break. The committee will probably be meeting more often as the date gets closer and once the PTA members are not as busy planning the dance, according to School No. 4 teacher and committee member Barbara Schwartzfarb.

“We have some ideas about what we want to do, but we really haven’t finalized anything yet,” said Schwartzfarb of the nascent committee’s efforts. “I know we’ll have cupcakes and a celebration of what we purchase. Right now we know we’re doing a celebration at the school with student involvement.”

And what do you get for a school when it turns 100?

“We wanted to purchase a special birthday gift as a lasting tribute,” Schwartzfarb said. “We are planning to purchase a statue or monument and place it in front on the school.”

During a recent meeting in the teachers’ break room, committee members were looking at pictures and debating the merits of various education-themed statues and monuments over sandwiches, salads, Diet Cokes and bottled waters.

Paying for whatever the committee settles on will be taken care of in part by the School No. 4 PTA’s “spare change” program. For the past several months there’s been a big jar outside the school’s office, “and children everyday would bring some small change and just throw it into the jar,” Schwartzfarb said.

“We wanted everyone to feel part of it,” she said. “So even if you could only contribute a little bit to this ‘gift,’ we wanted everyone to feel like they had a little piece of it. People, of course, if they wanted to give larger donations they were welcome, and some people did give larger, but really it was so that even a couple of pennies and you felt like you were part of this gift giving. That was important to us to make everyone feel involved. We wanted everyone in our School No. 4 community to be represented.”

So far the PTA’s spare change collection has resulted in approximately $500 toward the purchase of the as-yet-determined gift, the total cost of which the committee is also still in the process of determining.

Additionally, the committee has set up a display case in the main hall with memorabilia from the school’s past.

“People had some very old pictures of School 4 and some items to show what the school was like in the past,” Schwartzfarb said, describing the contents of the display case.

May 25 is not School No. 4’s actual “birthday.” In fact, Schwartzfarb isn’t even sure what the actual date of the anniversary is. If it rains on the 25th, they’ll hold the birthday party on the 27th. The date was chosen because the teachers want to hold the celebration outside—and the weather’s likely to be nicer at the end of May—and especially because they want the students involved.

Among the events definitely planned is to dig up and open a time capsule that was buried many years ago (Schwartzfarb isn’t sure how many) and possibly create one of their own.

“We’re going to bring that time capsule up and find out what’s inside, and we’re going to make a new capsule and put it back,” Schwartzfarb said. “And the students are going to be involved, because we’re going to have [them] perhaps write something about what they envision the school would be like 100 years from now.”

Aside from those writings, she’s not sure what else will go in the 2011 time capsule. That is yet one more thing to be determined by the members of the School No. 4 100 Year Birthday Committee during future meetings over lunch.

“Our goal is celebrate the past, participate in the present and be remembered in the future,” Schwartzfarb said.

Members of the School No. 4 100 Year Birthday Committee are as follows:

Elizabeth Bartel, Maria Conway, Joanne Frim, Ada Garcia, Sandy Kim, Janet LaRusso, Mark Leonard, Alicyn Liquori, Kimberly Martinez, Jenny McCann, Chris Sargenti, Barbara Schwartzfarb and Cara Solazzo.