Main Street School Farmingdale

The Powell Avenue School only went up to the 8th grade, and if a student went to high school he went to Hicksville or Hempstead. In 1931 Central Park Students had the opportunity to attend Farmingdale High School. The students were bused to and from school. If you stayed after school for activities you had a three to five mile walk home, or you had to make arrangements for a ride home. It was not uncommon to have a caring teacher drive you home. The last graduating class of students from Bethpage was in 1955.

The tuition paid by the Central Park/Bethpage School District to the Farmingdale School District helped fund the expansion of the Main Street School during the depression years.

Jack Gifford participated in a program held at the Farmingdale/Bethpage Historical Society March 18, 2001, and he told of his experiences attending Farmingdale High School in 1933 with 15 students from Central Park. The total number of students graduating from Farmingdale High School in 1937 was 82. For his presentation he came across a copy of the Baccalaureate Sermon preached to the graduating class in 1937, by Reverend Johathon Sherman, it read in part: "I am convinced that the general situation confronting the younger generation is one which give us many grounds for pessimism. In our own country the increasing strife in industry, the corrosion of established political institutions, the incidence of juvenile delinquency, the disintegration of family life with its consequent loss of moral stability, and in the world at large economic insecurity and the intensification of militaristic nationalism---these altogether provide us with a picture in which the ubiquitous feature is chaos."

(Information from the FBHS program March 18, 2001)