Students preserve lessons of resolve for Class of '72
A photo of snow, which a 14-year-old immigrant from Ecuador saw for the first time after leaving home.
A video of two girls dancing to a K-pop song in the school hallway.
And handwritten letters by students, all English-language learners at Paul D. Schreiber High School and Carrie Palmer Weber Middle School in the Port Washington school district, documenting “the good and the bad, the happy, the sad” during the pandemic.
Those items and others — drawings, masks and digital content stored on a flash drive — were placed into a time capsule and buried at the high school entrance Tuesday, to be unearthed in 50 years by the Class of 2072.
Educators said the capsule serves as an outlet for the students to process the difficult experience of leaving home and adapting to a new environment during a global health crisis. Superintendent Michael Hynes was designated the key keeper, and a plaque was placed next to the burial site to indicate its location.
Luis Alana, 13, who emigrated from Ecuador last year, decorated his letter with a soccer ball, a jersey and his first name written over the colors of the Ecuadorian flag.
“When I came to this country and I didn’t know many people and couldn’t speak English, what helped me get through the difficult times were my family and soccer,” the seventh-grader wrote in the letter.
“When I came to this country and I didn’t know many people and couldn’t speak English, what helped me get through the difficult times were my family and soccer,” Luis Alana wrote.
Credit: Howard Schnapp
During a ceremony Tuesday, Luis said he found solace in his favorite sport.
“Soccer was a great distraction that helped me focus on the good, not on the bad,” he told a crowd of dozens of teachers, parents and students.
What the students went through reminded arts education consultant Elise May of her mother, Rosine Pearlman, who fled France when she was around 11 to escape Nazi occupation.
“She came with her family. … The students here, many of them came without their family,” said May, who developed the multicultural voices program for English language learners in the school district.
The multicultural voices program is funded by a New York State Council on the Arts grant and facilitated with the support from district administrators and teachers. About 30 students participated in the time capsule project.
“My heart feels for all of them,” May said. “This allowed some of their stories to be told.”
Arts education consultant Elise May with the time capsule. “This allowed some of their stories to be told,” she said. Credit: Howard Schnapp
One of teacher Kimberly Caracciolo’s favorite items of capsule memorabilia was a photo of two girls in Halloween costumes.
Samantha Zhirzhan, 12, came from Ecuador last summer and quickly befriended Jimena Campos, 14, who arrived in the United States three years ago from Guatemala. In the photo, Samantha, dressed as Cleopatra, and Jimena, in an angel outfit, had their arms around each other, smiling.
“Seeing Samantha so welcomed and accepted and just brought into the fold of the classroom just brightened my day,” said Caracciolo, who teaches English as a New Language at the middle school.
Susan Colon, an ENL teacher at the high school, said some students included watershed moments in their lives for the capsule.
One teenager chose the photo of a reunion at the airport where she and her sister embraced their mother after five years of separation. The reunion took place in January 2021, and the family is from Ecuador, Colon said.
“It was just such a special moment for her,” Colon said of the student, who didn’t attend the ceremony Tuesday. “It's like the new beginning here for her.”
Dandan Zou covers education for Newsday. Previously, she worked for a community newspaper in Maryland and a personal finance magazine in Washington, D.C.
