SOMS Science Dept. is a Family Affair for the Cicenias

Reflecting on what they'll miss about working alongside their mother, Elizabeth, SOMS science teachers Anthony and Louis Cicenia looked back on the practical jokes, like when they came into her classroom and pretended to snore or threw paper balls at students as she was teaching.

"I'm going to miss shutting the lights off on her," said Anthony, who shares the teaching responsibilities for seventh grade science with his mother. ("They either leave here loving Cicenias or hating Cicenias," he joked.) He also acknowledged that he counts on her to do the ordering for their classes, including the packages of frogs for dissection.

Elizabeth, a Maplewood resident, is retiring after 27 years as a teacher and 26 at South Orange Middle School. She started her career as a bacteriologist at the VA Hospital in East Orange and then took 20 years off to raise her four children, three of whom are now teachers. She decided to retire for various reasons, one of which is to spend more time with her husband, a former carpenter foreman who retired two years ago.

Anthony and Louis are both CHS graduates (in '89 and '91, respectively) who went on to attend Seton Hall. Anthony joined the SOMS faculty in 1996 and was an assistant coach on the CHS girls basketball team from 1998 and the boys baseball team from 2000 until last season, when he left in anticipation of the birth of his second child. Louis has been at SOMS for four years, having taught at a Catholic school and in the Montville school district for 10 years prior to that, and coaches the CHS girls softball team. He teaches eighth grade science, but all three Cicenias are in the same hallway. (Also in the corridor is eighth grade science teacher Jazmine Wright, whom they call another Cicenia. Her mother, SOMS physical education teacher and CHS girls basketball coach Johanna, is just down the hall in the gymnasium.)

Louis noted that he moved his family to South Orange (where his wife is from) and got a teaching job in the district largely to be closer to their parents. He was offered a job in the district 13 years ago but turned it down, worried about the perception.

"This way you couldn't say it was nepotism," said Louis, who credited his mother with helping to show him the ropes when he started off as a science teacher. He got a job at St. Cassian School in Montclair at the start of his teaching career, but the job posting had a typo that said it was for a social studies teacher when in fact the opening was for science. (A history major at Seton Hall, he wound up doing master's work at Fairleigh Dickinson to deepen his knowledge of the sciences.)

Elizabeth noted that she's enjoyed having her sons in the school building to watch her back, like when groups of students in the hallways get over-excited and they take over as disciplinarians. However, they try to limit shop talk when they're outside of school. ("We get yelled at by my dad a lot," said Anthony, who lives in South Plainfield.)

When asked which of her boys was the better teacher, Elizabeth had a quick answer: "My daughter [a special education teacher in Millburn]," she deadpanned.