A Centennial School Celebration has big meaning to a mom and her kids

The school in 1919.

For the past few years, I’ve been wondering just how common it is to have your kids go to the same elementary school you went to when you were a kid? I never attended any of my parent‘s schools, not even to their college, which seems to be a little more popular these days.

Both of my two girls go to the same elementary school I went to when I was younger. When my oldest daughter started in kindergarten at the school, one of the teachers I had in fifth grade was still teaching there. When I went up to her to say hello, she teased me and said she was retiring because I made her feel old since my kids were now going to school there. She actually did retire the following year, so now there aren’t any of the teachers that were there when I was there. My older daughter does have one of the teachers both my two sisters had when they went to school there, which is pretty cool.  

The school today

The school I am talking about is Seminole Elementary School. If you live in Pinellas County you probably know someone who has gone to school there or has worked there. Next year the school will be one hundred years old, so thousands of students have walked the halls there.

The oldest part of the school, which was build in 1915 is the building located off of Park Boulevard. When I went to school there, the building was our cafeteria. Today the building is referred to as the centennial building and is used for the R Club, an afterschool program.

I always laugh because when I tell my youngest daughter a date like my birthday or when I graduated from high school it is in the 1900’s and she says to me, “you mean back in the nineteens?

I guess when your are born in the 2000’s, that was a long time ago.

It seems like yesterday though when I went to school at Seminole Elementary. I can remember how it was set up. Today, the students have art in what was once the office. The office today is one of the newer buildings on campus at the opposite end of the campus. Even with all the changes of some of the classrooms, my oldest daughter is in the same fifth grade classroom I was in when I was there.

What’s exciting is she will be graduating from the school the year of the centennial celebration. 

Of course, I somehow ended up on the centennial celebration planning committee, which is something I enjoy helping out with since I went there along with my siblings and now my kids go there.

We have a date for the event, which will be help on the school’s campus on Saturday, May 2, 2015.

The community is invited to attend the event. We want to reach out to prior students, teachers and administrators that were at Seminole Elementary.  We plan on having the entertainment made up of prior students. We are looking for food vendors and sponsors for our event.

If you want more information you can email the planning committee at SeminoleES100@gmail or look on www.facebook.com/seminoleelementary to get updates on the big day’s events. If interested in helping plan the event, meetings are held at Seminole Elementary School on the first Monday of the month at 3:15 p.m.

Since I started help plan for the centennial celebration, I am finding that more and more people in the community have gone to Seminole Elementary School, but not too many have gone there and their kids have gone there.