A Family Affair
Three generations hold a strong loyalty to Milltown’s Our Lady of Lourdes School
By Carolyn Hughes
Correspondent
MILLTOWN — When Tammy Sullivan and her husband Stephen had to decide
where to send their five-year-old daughter Emily to school, it was easy.
The obvious and only choice was their parish school, Our Lady of Lourdes, the alma mater of both Sullivan and her mother Ann Marie Simons, school nurse for the past 29 years.
With Emily’s three-year-old sister Elizabeth in tow, Sullivan told The Catholic Spirit that Elizabeth and the baby due to arrive next month, will also follow in Emily’s footsteps to Our Lady of Lourdes School.
A family parish and school
“Having gone here, why would I want my children to go anywhere else? It is very family-oriented, has outstanding teachers and everybody takes care of everyone else. And, of course, there is the Catholic side. I don’t want my girls going to a school where they can’t say morning prayers,” Sullivan said.
This fierce family loyalty to their parish school and to their faith runs deep in Milltown, where small-town friendliness draws and keeps families for generations, Simons explained. “I am so proud to be the first family with three generations coming.”
In addition, there are numerous second-generation families represented among the student body.
“And we like it that way!” Simons said. “It really is a family parish.” Naturally, all four of Ann Marie and Arthur Simons’ children — Traci, Taryn, Tammy and Todd — graduated from the school.
Simons’ family involvement began with her parents, Marie and the late George J. Rademacher, who enrolled her in the school. Her father was active in the fund drive that financed the present school building constructed in 1957, which, she points out, still looks contemporary in its style.
Our Lady of Lourdes School traces its beginning back to September 1942, when the school occupied the convent basement and front part of the rectory which has since been torn down. Starting in 1950, Simons attended kindergarten and first grade in the convent basement, second through sixth grade in the rectory, and only seventh and eighth grades in the new school.
Past and present
Simons reminisced about her early school days right after World War II.
“We walked to school then,” she said, even though that meant crossing busy Main Street, which was not so busy then. “And we went home for lunch,” something that is a thing of the past today. Uniforms were made of dry-clean-only linen, before the days of wash and wear.
While those quiet days are a thing of the past, Simons had only praise for the improvements that time has brought to the school, including a state-of-the-art computer lab, a smaller student to teacher ratio and the ability to draw students from a much wider area — North Brunswick, East Brunswick, New Brunswick and even South River.
But “some things never change,” Sullivan said. Simons noted that the First Friday Mass has been continuously offered since 1942, although the jelly donut and hot chocolate breakfasts served by the PTA years ago are now a fond memory.
Continuity does not end with the student body and devotional life. Sullivan likes the continuity in the school’s teachers, like her first grade teacher Veronica Brickman, who will teach Emily next year.
Simons has seen many children of alumni in the nurse’s office and is delighted when some come back to teach there later, like computer teacher Annabelle Certo.
Emily enjoys playing with a whole classroom of new friends in Little Servant Sister of the Immaculate Conception M. Elizabeth Halaj’s class, and is learning a great deal at the same time — for example, comparing lengths (early math) and practicing words (reading readiness).
Not surprisingly, classroom aide Pat Riczu’s three daughters attended Our Lady of Lourdes School, one of her granddaughters is a graduate and another now attends.
A safe haven
Sullivan described the school community as a safe haven in a progressively more threatening world. “I grew up under a ‘rock.’ I like it that way. I would like my children to grow up under a rock,” she said. “It is the whole atmosphere, the Catholic community.”
“You bring your most precious children here to learn about Jesus,” Simons added.
At the same time, Sullivan said, “Even though it was always safe and secure here . . . the school also got us ready for the outside world. We didn’t go out there unprepared.”
Mother and daughter fully believe in Catholic education as a whole, noting that Our Lady of Lourdes’ students have always scored very well in all high school and college entrance tests. They are accepted wherever they apply, Simons said.
*The attached/referenced article was originally published in The Catholic Spirit, the official newspaper of the Diocese of Metuchen, and is protected under U.S. and international copyright law