2007 marked the Bicentennial Year for the Town of Brunswick, and our secondary students worked on two major projects that helped local history come alive:  a brochure, and a documentary video.

Brochure

Ninth grade English students worked with the Town Historian to create a brochure highlighting the history of a local treasure, The Little Red Schoolhouse.  The Little Red Schoolhouse is truly unique in that it is one of the original District Schools for residents of the Town of Brunswick and is still owned and maintained by the Brunswick CSD. It’s within Ό mile of the school’s campus, so it is used for educational programming, both for our students and for students from neighboring schools as well as for local groups who want to learn more about its history.

The brochure was created for the Hometown Heritage Day celebration we planned to commemorate the placement of an historic marker at the old schoolhouse. It highlights the history of the school from when it was built, in the 1860s, through various renovations and uses to the present day. Students used their writing skills to hone this brochure to perfection, and not only was it well received by visitors to the site, but it also won second place in the New York State Archives History Contest.

View pages of the brochure in Adobe Acrobat Reader (PDF files):

Documentary Video

Students in our Videography Department in the secondary school worked on a two-year project with the Town Historian, members of the community and others to create the documentary: A Brief History of Brunswick’s District Schools. This 55-minute movie depicts many of the one and two-room schoolhouses, uses old maps, school archive records, census records, oral histories and many other authentic documents and research to trace the history of our school district from its inception through centralization to the present day.

Heralded locally, the video served as the centerpiece for the District’s participation in the town’s Bicentennial Celebration. It’s a permanent record of ‘times gone by’ and contains segments of interviews with both students and teachers who were part of the one-room schoolhouse era interwoven with local history, photographs, and memories of times gone by.

The video will also serve as the centerpiece for the 50th Anniversary of our school district being ‘centralized’.  Presentations to the student body and evening showings for the public are scheduled. Currently the video is available to be ‘checked out’ at the local library which, interestingly, is housed in a former ‘two-room’ schoolhouse.