While other schools are ghost towns on a Saturday afternoon, the gymnasium of Sterling Elementary School is bustling with people. The aroma of freshly grilled hot dogs and hamburgers wafts through the room, as folks young and old play carnival-style games, peruse through tables of free books or register their tikes for next year’s kindergarten class. The hallways are also humming with nostalgia, as countless old yearbook photos have been enlarged and plastered to the wall.
Since opening in the 1950s, Sterling Elementary has served as the educational foundation for thousands of young students. Back in the day, the school was a log cabin, which is still standing on the property of the nearby Sterling Community Center. Today, the school has a much larger building and teaches about 120 kindergarten through sixth grade students.
“The synergy that was created here, amongst the staff and the students, was fantastic,” said Mick Audette, who taught music at the school for eight years. “Sterling is just an amazing place. This was just a fantastic place to be and it was a great eight years of my life while I was here.”
Given the size of its student body, the school has always had a small but mighty staff of teachers. Carol Boehmler taught at Sterling Elementary for 17 years. She says the comradery of the staff and atmosphere of the school was unmatched.
“We were, as a staff, really connected to each other and our kids," Boehmler said. "People would say, when they walked into Sterling, they could notice that.”
The 60th birthday party was also a trip down memory lane for a lot of former students. Christopher Smith is now a senior in high school, but looks back on his elementary school days with fondness.
“It’s definitely surreal, because I go to a school now where things change almost every year," he said. "To be able to come back to my elementary school where I thought things would be drastically different, and there’s still the same map of the planets in the library, and there’s still the same circle table that we sat at for read aloud. I’m glad that other younger kids got to experience similar things coming up through elementary school.”
Christopher’s mom, Jodi, also attended Sterling Elementary. She started kindergarten at the school in 1985 and remembers creating posters for the school’s renowned spaghetti feeds. As an adult, she worked at the school and says the environment has always been an enjoyable one because of its staff.
“I just always remember having fun in elementary school," Jodi said. "It didn’t matter what year it was or what class it was, it was always fun.”
“It’s hugely important for us to bring our community back into our school,” said Denise Kelly, Sterling Elementary School principal. “COVID is long gone, but in reality it really did shut down a lot of things. We haven’t had huge events like this in that long, and so we wanted to bring the community and families together and have a fun activity for everybody to do on a Saturday afternoon.”
Kelly says the celebration brought in about 100 new and familiar faces, all in some way connected to Sterling Elementary School. Attendees say the school has always been a great place to teach or learn.
