ON CENTRE: BALD EAGLE AREA

From the first day to the very last

By Ed Mahon

Truly eagle-eyed readers, or at least a mother, will have caught a similarity between two issues of the Centre Daily Times published 12 years and more than nine months apart.

Craig Houtz

Wingate Elementary teacher Karen Hrabowenski, left, greets Samantha Watson and her mother Bonnie Watson on her first day of school on Sept. 3, 1996.

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The Sept. 4, 1996, and June 12, 2009, editions both featured Samantha Watson on the front page.

The first time, it was the first day of class in the Bald Eagle Area School District and she was starting as a kindergarten student at Wingate Elementary School.

Back then, kindergarten teacher Janice Schaub told a reporter that starting the year with an hourlong orientation for both children and parents — as opposed to a half-day of school for only children — helps cut down on the fears and tears.

“They come with their parents on the first day, and some don’t want to leave,” Schaub said in 1996.

The second time was on her last day in the Bald Eagle Area School District, at the high school’s graduation ceremony earlier this month.

It’s a pretty cool coincidence, one we didn’t plan or even initially notice.

Samantha’s mother Bonnie e-mailed us two days after graduation to point it out.

So we dug through our archives, in search of the original photo. We happened upon another similarity: Centre Daily Times photographer Craig Houtz took both front page photos of Samantha.

Chris Rosenblum normally writes a weekly column about community news in the Upper and Lower Bald Eagle valleys that appears on Mondays. While he is on vacation, Ed Mahon is filling in.