Group Wants School Named After Longtime Princeton Principal

PRINCETON, NJ — The Princeton Public School District may rename Riverside Elementary School after its longtime principal who died in February of last year. Bill Cirullo passed away on Feb. 15, 2016. He was the school’s principal for 30 years.

In December, a group of teachers and other supporters asked the district to rename the school in his honor, the Princeton Packet reports. The district has said it will survey the school community and advertise in a local newspaper, with the final decision coming from the Board of Education.

He graduated from the Princeton Public School District, which he first entered when he was in kindergarten. He went on to spend countless years as a teacher, coach and principal in the district that raised him.

“When you work with great people - when you work with visionaries” he once said, “it is like an endless riot of ideas and possibilities.”

That “riot” resulted in a school garden, a turtle pond, a black box theater, a wonderfully diverse pre-school, and countless curriculum initiatives. As recently as 2015, Cirullo was bringing children together with a landscape designer to create a new playground.

While in school, he starred on the football and track teams at Princeton High School and later coached football and lacrosse at Princeton High School.

He founded the Bobby Campbell Lacrosse Foundation, named in memory of a former player, to bring lacrosse to underprivileged youth, and he coached an adult lacrosse team in Princeton for a decade.

Attached image of Bill Cirullo previously provided by the Princeton Public School District