Students unearth capsule
Posted on Thursday, May 18, 2006
ROGERS — Kate Sbarra saw her Beanie Baby parrot again after seven years and will visit it one more time at Project Graduation. The parrot has a role in two graduations for Sbarra and the rest of the class that finished fifth grade at Northside Elementary School in 1998.
On Monday, after finishing their senior classes at Rogers High School, Sbarra and about 60 other Northside graduates were invited back to unearth the time capsule they buried as part of their fifth-grade graduation. It was a chance to see what had been important to them when they were in elementary school.
Besides the parrot, they found a copy of a book that is still in use in the fifth grade, teacher Linda Jefferson said. There were also Tootsie Rolls and animal crackers that teacher Larry Tuttle used as rewards; friendship rings that declared two fifth-grade girls would be friends forever; a hand-drawn panther autographed by all the students, and lots of papers and pictures. Everything was placed in a Tupperware tub and buried near the steps of the school, Jefferson said. Most of it withstood the time underground well, she said.
About 12 of the former fifth-graders returned, Jefferson said, and the first thing they did was tour the school. Most of them remarked that it seemed much smaller, she reported.
Although elementary schools in Rogers have a high mobility rate with lots of students moving in and out, Northside has a fairly stable population, Jefferson said. When the district has been forced to adjust boundaries, Northside’s boundaries haven’t changed much, and there are many families that stay put through their children’s elementary years. So for the first six years of their school career, some Northside students have the advantage of a stable school environment where staff and students can get to know each other.
Jefferson has been teaching at Northside for 20 years, and she admits that it’s difficult to remember all the students who have passed through her classroom. She thinks of them as 10- and 11-year-olds, and when they come back as 17- and 18-year-olds, it’s hard to connect them with the faces in the old yearbook.
Some of her students have stayed in touch with each other over the years. Kate Sbarra is still friends with three girls who attended Northside with her, and they all returned together to see the time capsule.
Parent Sherry Powell bought balloons for a balloon launch just like they had during the fifth-grade picnic. "It was a great feeling that they thought so much of their time at Northside that they would come back as adults,"Jefferson said. There’s one more time capsule buried on campus that next year’s seniors can unearth. Her current students have heard about the project and want to do their own time capsule, but Jefferson is leaving it up to the PTO because the organization plans the fifth-grade graduation each year.
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