Founders Day

Founders Day 2024

 

Happy Founders Day! As always, today was a fabulous day with great fun being had during all three central Founders Day traditions – Buddy time (who doesn’t love hanging with a big/little buddy?), the Founders Day play (click the link to see the recorded Pandemic version of the play from the spring of ‘21), and, of course, an ice cream treat (watch the play or ask your children and they will explain why ice cream).  Breaking news – there may be a new tradition for Founders Day. The third graders wrote a song entitled, “Our Time at LREI”.  A rousing tune!

Someone asked me, “Why is it Founders Day, not Founder’s Day or Founders’ Day?  Good question.  I have thought about this from time to time and have a working theory.

The day celebrates LREI’s founders, not solely one founder nor does it belong to one or more founders. It is a day, instead, to celebrate the founding idealists who created our amazing school. So who are these founders?

Elisabeth Irwin was the force behind the founding of the school, in its first iteration as a public school classroom, then as a kindergarten – eighth grade school opening in the current 196 Bleecker Street building, and adding the high school in 1941. So why the plural “Founders”?

I can think of a few other folks who were with EI when she founded the school. As we see in the play, there were teachers who wanted to learn what EI’s mentor John Dewey called, “the new methods” and at the Little Red School House they found a professional home and in Elisabeth they found a teacher’s teacher. They also found a classroom, and then a whole school building, filled with willing, eager students.  Who were these founding students?

I only know one member of the first class who entered through the Bleecker Street door late in September 1931.  She likes to share the story of growing up in Harlem and going to school in the Village and that her father, who owned a funeral home, would drive her downtown in a hearse each school day. While parents made the decision to send them to the school, the students’ innate willingness to jump in allowed what Miss Irwin called her “experiment” to prosper.

And then there were the parents. You saw them in the play. The first cohort of parents paid the school’s expenses, including salaries. The parents pitched in in a variety of ways that kept the school running, until tuition and other areas of the school became more regular. They were young families who lived in the neighborhood, families who were not welcome in other private schools, or who were looking for something new and courageous and forward thinking for their children. Many parents in the school’s first decades were artists and many others were teachers in the NYC public schools!

The school grew and matured to meet the demands of the changing times and we should count the educators, students, and parents who came later, at each inflection point, to be founders of the version of LREI they entered, as each year, each moment in history, brings with it challenges and opportunities for a school as dedicated as we are to being part of the wider world. 

Which brings us to today’s LREI community – invested, active, collaborative, creative, and focused on a secure and just future – putting its own stamp on LREI as founders of the school that we experience today.  Inspiring!

I share one last shout out before I sign off. I offer my undying admiration and gratitude to all of the school’s employees who live the mission of LREI each and every day, with the energy and passion and expertise of the “founders” who came before them.