Hancock Shaker Village in Massachusetts For some Brooklyn Friends School faculty, summer research is a religious experience. Middle School History teacher Amanda Goodwin, now in her second year at the school, received a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant to study Religious Revivals, Utopian Societies and the Shaker Experience in America this past […]
In social studies, fourth grade students learned about New Amsterdam and how New York City evolved over time. As part of their unit, they built a model of what the Dutch settlement in today’s Lower Manhattan would look during the 17th century. We used the iPad app iMotion HD Pro to add animation to their […]
The program of our first commencement, from 1910 BFS has always strived to be compassionate for its community, particularly for its students, both while enrolled at our school and forever after. Compassion is often found at the core of the Quaker Testimonies. One of the nicest BFS archival finds remains the “BFS chapter” from the personal […]
“This Is Our Quiet Time” BFS ordinarily shares brief clips in its Video Archives, but we make an exception this week with the full version of the original BFS musical, Forward to the Past. Written and performed by the BFS community in 1989, Forward to the Past: the Historical Hysterical Follies of Brooklyn Friends School, relates our school’s […]
1902 saw one of the biggest moments in Brooklyn Friends School history, our third expansion which created the school building still standing today at 112-114 Schermerhorn, now rented by New York Quarterly Meeting to the NYC Board of Education for Brooklyn Frontiers High School. Today it seems amazing that any building could take only about eight […]
It proved to be a false alarm the morning of March 1,1971, at our historic home of 116 Schermerhorn, when BFS received a ominous phone call threatening, “There is a bomb planted in your building.” The fire alarm was soon activated and the buildings were evacuated, searched, then given the all-clear and BFS was able […]
1928-1936 BFS Lower School Scrapbook,news clipping of the first May Day, 1928“Emulating the May Day Celebration of the Early Settlers…” Sometimes history reveals a past that is not always what we want it to be, even at BFS. A few months back, I wrote about our school’s path to enrolling students of color, particularly to […]
Stuart Smith, 1968 to 1978 Since 1867, BFS has had 19 heads of school, not including interim heads. Over the years, the title of our school’s highest administrative role has evolved from principal to headmaster to today’s head of school. The history of each administration is unique, fascinating and lengthy, so today I’ll only give […]
BFS Commencement and Important AnnouncementsBrooklyn Daily Eagle, June 6, 1914 This week, your friendly historian decided to time-travel back one hundred years to the 1913-1914 school year at BFS. Turning once again to The Brooklyn Daily Eagle at one of my favorite sites, fultonhistory.com, I found this page containing the article, “Friends School to Have […]
Found tucked away in the archives several years ago is this item written by Henry Morris Haviland, recalling his student days at BFS from 1872 to 1876. Such items are quite a find for our school, especially since Mr. Haviland explained the locations of the classrooms in the lower level of the Brooklyn Meeting House. Our school was […]
Celebrating our school having been saved,The Friends School Life, February 16, 1948 This week, I’m following up on last week’s post concerning the discovery of the 1947-1948 Fight to Save BFS Scrapbook which allowed us to finally remember an incredibly important moment in our school’s history. I’d like to share a few items since historical events are deeply nuanced […]
A jaw-dropping BFS moment of my last ten years working at my alma mater occurred in 2006, during preparations to renovate the MS/US Library on the 3rd floor of 375 Pearl Street. I came to work one day to find a large and worn scrapbook on my desk chair, accompanied by a tiny note from MS/US […]
