Schools
Salem School Celebrates Founder's 90th Birthday
"Folks thought she was crazy to build a school in a greenhouse. All we can say is, thank God she did!"
From the Greenhouse School: Greenhouse School Founder's Day, April 27, which is the birthday of Patricia Jennings-Welch, who founded the Greenhouse School in 1983, having started the Solarterre-e-em in 1979.
We started celebrating the day as Founder's Day in 2009 after her passing. Not only does it give us a way to keep her spirit alive in one of the very ways she enjoyed most--a party! with cake and ice cream!--but it helps us pay homage in a more formal way to the genius of this special lady who founded and nurtured the unique and special community that is The Greenhouse School.
The kids' favorite part is the cake and ice cream, of course, but the festivities include our forsythia ceremony, where students observe a moment of silence and float a spring of forsythia on the school's pool. The ritual recalls a story from Jennings-Welch's birth: her father is said to have plucked forsythias from a neighbor's yard on the way to the hospital to bring to her mother while in labor.
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A participant also reads the poem To Patsy, penned also by Ms. Welch's father on the occasion of her first communion. In recent years, Ms. Julia has instituted the students' reading of Shel Silverstein's poem 'If the World Was Crazy.' Current director and proud protogee of Ms. Welch, Nambalirwa-Lugudde thinks it is the perfect encapsulation of all the wacky magic that makes the Greenhouse School so incredible and successful. "Folks thought she was crazy to build a school in a greenhouse. All we can say is, thank God she did!"
Phots courtesy of the Greenhouse School
