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03/07/2018 07:15 AMThis is a benchmark year for Essex Preschool: It is celebrating its 50th anniversary. That means, if you were a four-year-old in that first preschool class in 1968, the school’s anniversary is a reminder that you, too, have passed a number of significant benchmarks.
“I can’t believe it’s 50 years,” said Cemmy Ryland, who started the school using space at the First Congregational Church in Essex.
Though it still rents space from the church, the preschool welcomes students of all faiths.
Ryland needed a nursery school when her younger son, Kyle, turned four. Her older son, Thane, had gone to a preschool in Old Saybrook that closed when the operator moved.
“I thought I could do this,” Ryland recalled, as she reflected on her decision to start the preschool.
Ryland had a degree in psychology from Wellesley, where she had worked at a nursery school on the campus, and at the time she decided to start the preschool, she was working at Yale in the field of psychology.
Emily Rapp, who grew up in Essex and now lives in Deep River, was in one of those early classes. She doesn’t have specific memories of what went on in preschool.
“That’s hard at my age to remember from when you were only four,” she admitted, but has clear recollections of Ryland. “It’s so great to see Mrs. Ryland; I think she was almost like a second mom to me.”
Those first students, in fact, didn’t go to Essex Preschool. The original school was named Grasshopper Green. It met on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning at the church. Another preschool, Pooh’s Corner, used the church basement on Tuesday and Thursday. The name change was the result both of the merging of the two, and a ruling by the secretary of the State of Connecticut’s office when licensing became required for preschools.
“They said ‘Grasshopper Green doesn’t mean a thing’ and insisted we change the name,” Ryland recalled.
Grasshopper Green, nonetheless, still exists. Peggy Ames, who now heads Essex Preschool since Ryland’s retirement in the mid-1990s, opened a second nursery school called Grasshopper Green in Lyme.
Both Ames and Ryland agree that, despite added demands to make rudimentary academics a part of preschool, the emphasis has to be on play and socialization.
“We need to bring in play—we never got rid of it. We want to get the markers and the Play-Doh out on the table and not worry about the mess,” Ames said.
She added that youngsters need that kind of arts and crafts activity to develop fine motor skills, and to have fun.
“We want children to leave saying they had a great day,” she said.
Ryland noted that simply using the term preschooler doesn’t adequately describe the vast difference between youngsters of different ages and stages of development. Some things, she noted tend to remain true.
“Four-year-old girls,” she said, “can run the world.”
Preschool is a place, Ames noted, where children learn about the structure of school day, how activities change, and how patterns are established. And they learn that there are other adults they need to pay attention to besides parents.
“If they came reading and writing, we fostered that,” Ryland said.
“But we are not rushing children into reading; there is a pace, a time when children are reading ready,” Ames noted.
Ryland pointed out that learning letters doesn’t have to be a textbook exercise.
“You can bring in children’s everyday experiences, identify letters in stores on a carton of milk,” she said.
Preschools have had a challenging time over the past decade in this area; as the population of youngsters declines, preschools in several towns have closed. The economic challenges following the stock market crash on 2008 meant that preschool became a luxury some families could no longer afford.
Ryland has a simple explanation for why Essex Preschool has survived for half a century.
“It’s the staff; it’s always been the quality of the staff,” she said.
There is not going to be any special celebration to mark five decades. The preschool, which, unlike many, does not have a graduation ceremony to mark moving up to kindergarten, will have its traditional end-of-year ice cream social.
For Ryland, however, as she looks back on the decades, there is, nonetheless, a sense of wonder.
“I can believe that children who were in that first class are now in their mid-50s,” she said. “I can’t even believe my own son is that old.”