Huntington PTAs Present Senior Awards

The Huntington PTA Council and the Huntington High School PTSA presented scholarships to six Class of 2023 members at the high school’s senior scholarships and awards ceremony.

The Huntington PTA Council presented a $500 scholarship to Evelyn Benitez, who plans to study at Molloy College.

The high school PTSA unit recognized Talia Addeo (University of Tennessee Knoxville), Joseph Algieri (Hartwick College), Koi Crowder (Molloy University), Yoselin Fuentes-Velasquez (Farmingdale State College) and Erin Scanlon (University of Georgia) with $500 awards.

All six of the Huntington seniors distinguished themselves in the high school’s classrooms, completing an extensive array of classes that covered every academic area. The group played on Blue Devil teams and participating in the club programs. Many of them took on leadership positions, including serving as team captains and club officers.

The teenagers exceeded the PTA’s standards of scholarship and service toward others with many of them volunteering with community organizations.

Huntington UFSD has one of the longest continuously functioning PTAs in the state. The organization traces its founding to a meeting in 1923 of six parents and Principal Agnes Bailey at what was then known as Lowndes Avenue School, which was situated on the south side of the property that is now home to Jack Abrams STEM Magnet School.

The parents met in Room 115 of Lowndes Avenue School “to discuss ways and means” of providing free milk to a large number of undernourished children whose parents were economically unable to supply their children with the necessary amount of milk for good health.

The parent’s milk campaign was the start of something special in Huntington. “At this time we were buying milk in quart bottles (retail price) and serving it in paper cups,” wrote Mrs. Bailey in 1958. “The front of our auditorium was the area used for this purpose.”

The group’s first organized fundraiser was a roast beef dinner prepared and served on the second floor of the old four-room School Street School. It was located across the street from the current Jack Abrams School parking lot (the one with the basketball courts on the south side of the building).

After a period of rapid enrollment growth, Lincoln School was erected on E. 9th Street in Huntington Station adjacent to St. Hugh of Lincoln Roman Catholic Church in 1923/24. (Woodbury Avenue Grammar School was built at the same time.)

By 1925 the parents of Lincoln’s students had affiliated with parents from Lowndes Avenue School to organize the district’s first PTA. “The first two years this organization included parents and teachers from both Huntington Station schools,” according to Mrs. Bailey.