In its 53-year history, Bergen Meadow Elementary educated more than 15,000 students with the help of 1,500-plus teachers. Many of those teachers and students returned to the school May 1 to bid it farewell.
Bergen Meadow will close at the end of the school year, a victim of declining enrollment. It will combine with its sister school, Bergen Valley Elementary, in fall 2024, which will be renamed Bergen Elementary. To celebrate the mark it made on the Evergreen community, the school hosted a closing ceremony May 1 that drew a packed house.
Five former principals whose tenure spanned from 1983 to today spoke at the event. Attendees also got to view the contents of five time capsules buried at the school from the 1980s to 2011, and scrapbooks highlighting the school’s and students’ successes. It was an evening of tears, laughter and many, many hugs.
Speakers returned to a common theme: that the spirit of community established at Bergen Meadow will exist far beyond its closure.
“A school is not a building,” said former principal Judy Herm, who served from 1997 to 2001. “It’s a meeting of hearts and minds devoted to the best education of the students. That legacy will continue.”
“Don’t see this as an ending,” said former principal Barb Boillot. “See it as a way to pay it forward, to celebrate that we can and are making a difference in children’s lives.”
Principals shared not only their love for the school and gratitude to the community but tales of bears, mountain lions and a dead elk on the playground — which parent volunteers heroically removed before recess.
Current principal Kristen Hyde, who joined the staff in 2019, dealt with the challenge of leading a school through the pandemic.
“I was full of hope and optimism and then March 2020 hit,” she said. “My hopes turned into frantic planning, and how to literally keep my students and staff alive. We received new guidelines daily to the point where ‘pivot’ became a bad word. But we got through it together.”
The school’s longest-term teacher Meg Eckert said she originally hoped to teach in an inner-city school and reluctantly accepted the job at Bergen Meadow. She stayed for 29 years.
“I never once looked at another school,” she said.
Eckert noted the school’s population split into two age groups when Bergen Valley opened and is now coming back together as one.
“I get to see it come full circle,” she said. “We are not tearing down a building. We are building a community.”
School leaders honored Bergen parent and volunteer Pam Lush Lindquist, who organized the May 1 celebration and many other events.
The school community also paid tribute to deceased teachers Walt Goltl and Terri Lee Hessner.
After the ceremony, attendees walked the hallways, peeking in classrooms and recalling days past.
“There are so many memories; they all rush in,” said Steve Farley, who taught at the school for 23 years. “As a new teacher, I had nothing to compare it with. But as I talked to people, I realized the grass was not greener. I couldn’t have worked at a better place.”
Many searched for student handprints in a hallway marked with hundreds of colorful painted hands. Departing second-graders paint their handprints there to memorialize their time at the school and signify their passage to Bergen Valley.
“I’ve cried so many tears,” said 27-year Bergen Meadow teacher Cristi Galan, as she and her husband photographed their two sons’ prints. “It’s always the hands that make me cry.”
The Jeffco school board voted in November 2022 to close Bergen Meadow and 15 other schools with declining enrollment.
Bergen Meadow and Bergen Valley — located less than two miles apart and known together as The Bergens — share a principal; buses; a PTA; a digital teacher librarian; art, music and physical education teachers; mental health professionals and more.
Bergen Meadow served pre-kindergarten through second-grade students and Bergen Valley third through fifth graders.
Jeffco Public Schools is building a 15,000-square-foot, 10-classroom addition to Bergen Valley Elementary School to prepare for its new students and transformation to Bergen Elementary.