**CORRECTION AT END OF ARTICLE**
Skinner Middle School turns 100 this year and the community is invited to help celebrate! School families, faculty, and staff are planning a number of events over the year, starting with the Fall Festival on Saturday, October 9, from 10am – 2pm, which is free and open to the community whether or not they have students at the school.
Kellie Beiers is the mother of a Skinner 8th grader and helping plan the 100 year celebrations. After participating in a similar celebration at Edison elementary a few years ago and seeing the community come together, she’s excited to be working with alumni and other parents spanning several generations. “There’s so many people who have stories,” said Beiers. “It’s good for our kids to see.”
Some of those stories will be on display at the festival: the Skinner team has been going through their vault of memorabilia: yearbooks, photo collages, and documents spanning decades. The public can take a walk through Skinner’s history, which is forever intertwined with the history of North Denver.
The all outdoor festival will also have great food and fun carnival games for kids. There will also be student performances by Skinner students and North High School students, many of whom passed through Skinner’s halls just a few years ago. There’s even a cake for the school’s birthday.
The October festival is just the first event though, with a large celebration planned for April. In the meantime, the school is asking for alumni to share their memorabilia: photos, certificates, newspaper clippings, graduation pamphlets, or whatever else former Skinner students have that they want to share with the community. Alumni can engage by emailing copies of their memorabilia, or questions, to SkinnerDPS100@gmail.com.
Rebecca Caldwell, Marketing and Communications Coordinator for the school, said they are also designing special 100 year shirts and other items that should be available this year.
The Denver North Star will be helping them celebrate too; be on the lookout for more about the 100 year celebrations next spring.
Our First Correction
It was bound to happen eventually: we ran something that was wrong and we wanted to let you know. Last month, we talked about Skinner’s 100 year anniversary, the school’s celebrations, and how you can get involved. One problem: during the course of researching the school, the celebration organizers and school officials realized that it’s actually their 99th year in operation. While Skinner was finished in 1921, the school didn’t open until 1922.
The school still held their fall festival and are using the year to gather stories about the school’s (99 year) history. The delay just means the celebration will be even larger next year.
They are also highlighting the importance of research. Hopefully, it’s a good lesson to students to do their own research and not take everything adults (or newspapers) say as absolute truth. As the Russian proverb (Americanized by President Reagan) goes, “trust, but verify.”
Our apologies for the error and we look forward to more stories about our schools in the future. When we have a minor error in a story (such as listing a wrong committee an elected official serves on for example), we update the online version. For any larger errors in the future (which we hope not to have), we’ll run a correction like this in the next issue.
Congratulations to the Skinner community on your 99 year anniversary.
David Sabados
Publisher and Editor
The Denver North Star
Be the first to comment