progressive education

LREI’s Treasure Trove

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That's me working in the piano room at the Lower School.

The LREI Archives Project is in full swing! I have been coming in on Monday mornings to begin processing our paper files and the Alumni Archives Committee has been getting together at the high school to go through our enormous collection of photographs that goes back to the beginning. They have been tirelessly sorting images and identifying students. We are lucky to have alumni with such solid memories of their classmates!

Just the other day, I came across an interesting photograph.

crucible miller

In this 1957 photo, Arthur Miller stands with the LREI cast of The Crucible after a performance. I also found this note that quotes a statement Miller made about the production.

crucible miller comments

Miller’s son, Robert Miller, was a student at EI and later went on to be a film producer who brought his father’s iconic play to the big screen in 1996 with his father as screenwriter.

This is but one of countless treasures I’ve unearthed in the LREI Archives. I will continue to share interesting finds from time to time to illustrate the depth and richness of LREI’s history, so please stay tuned!

 

Meeting Martha

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lrei_ar2 Meeting with Martha Foley LJ’s Office Monday, May 11, 8:45 am This morning, we had a second meeting with Martha Foley, the independent archivist who consulted on the LREI archives back in 1997-1998, when LREI had part of its archives inventoried under a grant from the Documentary Heritage Program. Also present were L.J., Ryann, and Vio (and me!). Martha reminded us about a VHS tape entitled “Celebrating  a Dream,” a 40-minute video about LREI that was made for the 75th anniversary.  The copy from the back of the tape case says:

A tribute to Elisabeth Irwin and a celebration of her legacy in progressive education. Using the 75th Anniversary of the school as a backdrop, Celebrating a Dream takes a current look at the school’s role in the development of progressive education. Students, alumni, parents, and faculty are among the voices interwoven with memorable images, both past and present, of everyday life in the school, touching on the history and the unique curriculum of the Lower, Middle, and High School . The video features high-lights of the symposium “Intelligent Action: Educating for Democracy” with the participation of distinguished educators. A grass-roots effort by parents, Celebrating a Dream shows the tradition of heartwarming respect, caring & concern that is unique to the Little Red School House & Elisabeth Irwin High School.

We will be digitizing the tape and uploading it for view shortly.  We thought that the video would be a good example of the kinds of archival material this project will make accessible to our community. We then discussed our yearbook digitization project. This project is being funded by the 2015 Senior Class Gift (thank you class of 2015!!!).  Making a searchable digital database of images from all LREI yearbooks will allow alumni to find themselves and their friends online and to add tags on photos where students are unidentified. This will therefore be a great way to get alumni interested in our project and to have some fun going down memory lane to boot! For the actual digitizing and indexing, Martha recommended using Hudson Micrographics, a family and women-owned business located just up the Hudson whose other clients include The New York Historical Society and Trinity Church. She recommends them over any of the larger, more corporate firms because they specialize in handling delicate books, such as old yearbooks, and will also come to us to look over the material and make assessments and will provide proposals customized to our specific needs. Many of the larger companies require the client to send their material to them,  but with Hudson we would have much more control over how our precious yearbooks are handled. We then moved on to the possibility of Martha coming in to do a detailed assessment of the LREI archives, where she would go through each item to let us know what we have (and what we might be missing) so that we can prioritize our archiving activities with the LREI Centennial in mind.  We decided that a week or so during the summer would be best, as things are very busy now that the school year is coming to a close. We will be getting back to Martha shortly with a start date, and we will be getting back to you with our further adventures in archiving!