ENFIELD, CT — With a new academic year beginning late last week in Enfield, I got to thinking about the schools I attended while growing up in the town. One unforgettable place, for a multitude of reasons, was Kosciuszko Junior High School.
For those of you who didn’t live in town until after the mid-1980s, you’re probably thinking, “What the hell is a Kosciuszko?” Well, the actual name was Thaddeus Kosciuszko Junior High School, named for a Polish military leader who fought on the colonists’ side during the American Revolutionary War.
How can you ever remember how to spell it? Back in the 1970s, we all memorized an acronym which I still used this morning while composing this column, nearly 45 years after I left the place: Keep Our School Clean, If U See Zebras Keep Out.
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Speaking of keep out, there was a very sophisticated system established to prevent bathroom smokers from being caught. Before you could enter any lavatory, you had to knock once and loudly announce, “It’s cool.” It took the teachers and principals about 48 seconds to crack that code.
Kosciuszko, known as “The Big K,” opened in 1964, five years before its crosstown rival, John F. Kennedy. Its athletic teams were nicknamed the Chargers. A Facebook group entitled “Kosciuszko Junior High Alumni Enfield CT” currently has more than 1,300 members, and former students share old photos and memories of their favorite (and not-so-favorite) teachers and principals.
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For a while, the yearbook staff believed in producing … ummm, shall we say, colorful publications. Exhibit A: this psychedelic beauty from 1975.
“The Big K” closed in 1982, when Enfield school administrators moved ninth-graders into the town’s high schools and shifted all seventh- and eighth-grade students to Raffia Road at the renamed John F. Kennedy Middle School. Later that year, the state of Connecticut began leasing the property (and eventually bought it) to accommodate the move of Asnuntuck Community College from its former home, a converted warehouse on Phoenix Avenue.
Here is a more contemporary look at the entryway.
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