Educators and students both past and present are invited to Williamsburg Elementary School on Nov. 29 as the school marks 50 years of educating area children.
From 5:30-6:30 p.m., prior to the school's regular PTO meeting, visitors are invited to enjoy celebratory cake and punch, explore the halls and generally reminisce regarding their time as a wildcat.
"We're going to have a slide show, we'll have old yearbooks from 1962 on up, and we've invited as many past teachers, principals, custodians and lunch servers as we could get addresses for," said school secretary Phyllis Barker. "We're just hoping for a nice get-together to celebrate the fact it's been around this long."
Barker, who has been in charge of organizing the part, said Williamsburg Elementary had some pretty humble beginnings.
"The original building in 1962 was just an office and four classrooms," she said. "Then, in about 1975, they added another wing and called it the junior high wing, and a lower wing for (grades) K-5."
Larry Nolte, who served as principal at Williamsburg for 13 years between the early 1980s and mid-1990s, described the school as "a very pleasant place to work."
"We had cooperative parents, and we had good kids - mostly," Nolte said. "It was a smaller school - our biggest enrollment at the time was about 230 - so you knew every kid's name."