What Parents Can Learn From the Portsmouth East and Sciotoville School Friends Group
It was a Sunday night, and my phone had been buzzing for an hour before I actually looked at it. The Portsmouth East and Sciotoville Community High School Friends group—about 1,000 members last I checked—was doing what it always does on slow evenings. Someone had posted a photo of a basketball jersey from 1978. The boy in it looked twelve, though he was probably eighteen, and the comments underneath were a mix of “That’s my dad!” and “I was at that game!” and one patient reply from a woman who wrote, “Honey, that’s the year your grandpa graduated. Don’t confuse it with 1979.”
I grew up next door to this world but not entirely in it. My kids go to the same district now, which is how I ended up in the group. A lady at work told me to join because, in her words, “people post when the buses are running late.” That’s true. It’s also true that they post when they lose a dog, when someone’s basement floods, when the varsity team wins a game they had no business winning, and when somebody’s great-aunt dies three days after her ninety-seventh birthday. The group is not organized. It just exists.
The 1,000 members number doesn’t sound huge, and in the social media sense, it isn’t. But here’s how it feels in a county where the school district covers a dozen small communities: that’s basically a whole generation of families and another generation of grandparents. It’s not the entire town. It’s everyone who stayed, and everyone who left but keeps one eye on the page to see what’s happening at home. There’s a difference.
Last month, our high school history teacher used the group in a way I didn’t expect. She posted that the building had a leak in the old art wing, and she asked if anyone remembered what used to be in that room. Within a day, she had forty photos of pottery wheels, a loom, and a cabinet full of stained glass from 1993. She printed them out for her class and put them on a bulletin board. The kids kept asking, “Who is that?” and she kept saying, “That’s your neighbor, that’s the guy who runs the hardware store, that’s somebody’s mom.” It wasn’t a formal lesson plan. It was just a Wednesday.
If you’re a parent new to a district, especially a small one, joining the local school friends group is one of the lowest-effort things you can do. You don’t have to post. Just read for a week. You’ll learn which teachers are retiring, what the drill is for early dismissal, and which crossing guard has been there since 2004 and doesn’t miss anything. When we first moved here, I almost didn’t join because I thought it would be cliquish. It is cliquish, in the way that any small community is. But it’s also practical. I once asked, “What time do the seniors do their prank every year?” An older woman replied, “They don’t call it a prank, sweetie. It’s called tradition.” That answered the question better than anything official.
There are heavier moments too. A few weeks ago, a woman posted about her brother, who graduated in 1988 and had passed after a long illness. She wasn’t looking for anything. Just putting it out into the world. The comments were short and plain. “I remember him at the Halloween football game.” “He fixed my tire once.” “We sat next to each other in math.” Nobody said “sorry for your loss” more than once, and nobody made it about themselves. Someone misremembered his name as David. Another person corrected it gently, saying he went by Davey. The woman said, “He liked that name least.” It was awkward, and then it wasn’t. That’s the group.
What I value is that my kids occasionally see me looking at my phone at the kitchen counter, and if they ask what I’m doing, I’ll say, “Mrs. Hennigan posted the old drama club sign-up sheet from 1991.” They roll their eyes. But once in a while, they read over my shoulder. They see a grown man write, “Coach Miller is the reason I graduated” and another grown man reply, “Coach Miller is the reason you still have a curfew.” And because these are adults who mostly behave themselves in this one specific place, the kids see something useful: people can have different memories and still share a space.
It’s not a perfect place. When the school board voted to discuss consolidation a few months back, the group got as ugly as any local forum gets. Someone compared the treasurer to a used-car salesman. Another person made three separate posts about parking, all of which somehow referenced the Civil War. The admin had to lock a thread for the first time in months. It was normal, in the way that any group of humans who care about the same building will sometimes be normal. That doesn’t erase the other ninety percent of the time, when the group is just a quiet shelf of shared history.
I think the reason 1,000 people keep coming back to this page is not nostalgia. It’s not even the news. It’s the fact that the school, in a town like this, is one of the few institutions that remembers you. Your church might change pastors. The grocery store gets a different owner every decade. But the gym floor stays the same, and the name on the gym wall stays the same, and the year you graduated stays the same. The group is just a digital version of that gym floor.
It’ll probably stay at around 1,000 members for a while. Some people leave when they move, a few come back when they retire. Last week a woman in Australia—the daughter of a 1972 graduate—asked if anyone had a photo of the old front entrance before the awning was added. Eight people posted one within an hour. She thanked them and said she wanted to show her father’s old address to his grandkids. No one asked how she found the group. No one asked why she needed it. They just posted the pictures and went on with their evening. I keep being surprised that a Facebook page can do that. But it can.
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