Oceanside Middle School celebrates its birthday

Back in 1983, when Oceanside Middle School opened, students could take short elective classes known as mods. There were the basics, like calligraphy, typing and computer programming. And there were more interesting mods, like Knitting for Fun and Profit, Mind Games and You’re a Yorker, Charlie Brown.

A trip down memory lane began in the middle school auditorium on the afternoon of April 8, when Principal Allison Glickman-Rogers invited the school’s founding faculty and administration to meet the current faculty at a special celebration of the school’s 27th birthday.

The event was organized by Ina Leventhal and Cathie Dato, two teachers at OMS, under the guidance of Glickman-Rogers. The main event was the recollections of Enid D’Arrigo, the school’s original principal.

Oceanside Middle School was created by the Board of Education in 1980 when the district was suffering from low enrollment and looking to close one of two junior high schools it operated at the time.

Victor Lecesse, the assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction — a position now held by Robert Fenter, a former OMS principal — had the idea to combine the two junior high schools into a middle school.

Three years after the board voted to create a middle school, the junior high school that was attached to School 9E became Oceanside Middle School, and the other junior high school eventually became Oceanside High School Castleton. “Most of my life was spent here, trying to do wonderful things for the children,” D’Arrigo said.

To show how far things have come since the school opened, D’Arrigo shared the story of how she and the faculty used to figure out scheduling for students. When the school was founded, it did not have computers to figure out the scheduling. So D’Arrigo and others would cover a table with paper cups, each representing a different class. They filled the cups with pieces of paper, each with a student’s name on it, slowly building a schedule.

D’Arrigo was the school’s principal until she retired in 2001, when she was replaced by Fenter.