Rockland Historical Society Plans First High School History Conference

The Historical Society of Rockland County will host its first ever day-long High School Local History Conference on April 9 with 11 schools participating.

High school history honor students, their advisors and social studies chairpeople from Clarkstown High School North, Clarkstown High School South, Nanuet High School, Nyack High School, Pearl River High School, Albertus Magnus High School, Ramapo High School, North Rockland High School, Spring Valley High School, Suffern High School and Tappan Zee High School will all attend. Clare Sheridan, a trustee of the Historical Society, said they are currently expecting somewhere between 60 and 70 students at the event.

The students have also been asked to prepare presentations on what is historic about their own towns or villages. The presentations will take place in the morning, with each school's students giving about a five-minute presentation on five historical things from their district.

The keynote speaker is Linda Zimmermann, author of “Rockland County:  A Century of History.” County Historian Craig Long, County Executive C. Scott Vanderhoef and State Sen. David Carlucci are also scheduled to speak.

Members from the historical society will also talk about ideas for community service in the various parts of Rockland County that relate to history.

The event is being organized by Larry Singer and William Sherwood, both Historical Society trustees and members of the education committee, along with Kevin Metcalf, North Rockland High School social studies coordinator and Steve Shepardson, advisor of the North Rockland Social Studies Honor Society.

Singer said the idea came up last fall when the Historical Society was doing their tours of homes in Haverstraw and needed docents in the houses. Singer, a retired North Rockland High School math teacher, called his former school to see if any of the social students honor students needed volunteer work. It didn’t end up working out, as the school recently changed its social studies honor requirements to seniors-only, and they hadn’t held the induction yet.

But Singer and social studies teachers kept talking about doing something to get the students involved in their local history.

“This is stuff in the kids’ backyards and we figure they might actually get interested in it,” Singer said. “It might make the volunteer work interesting and not a chore. The whole idea is to get students more involved and interested in history, especially local history.”

The afternoon session of the conference at the Comfort Inn in Nanuet will feature three breakout sessions, one with students, one with social studies chairs and another with social studies honor society advisors. Singer said the idea is to get the chairs and advisors from different schools talking about what they do at their own high schools. He added the hope is that the students will want to talk about what they learned from the morning, or possibly talk about volunteering together in the community based on the ideas brought up by the Historical Society members who speak earlier in the day.