When Dailard Elementary first opened its doors to students in 1976, Jeanie Grant Moore quickly enrolled her two daughters.
She lived, and still lives, only a block away from the San Carlos neighborhood school and was glad her daughters could now walk to school.
That year, Grant Moore’s youngest daughter entered first grade.
Today, a half-century later, Grant Moore’s great-granddaughter is now in first grade at Dailard.
“It’s so exciting that it’s been there for 50 years,” she said. “I can’t even believe we’ve been here for longer than 50 years in this house. But it kind of brings it all back, thinking about this.”
To honor Dailard Elementary’s place in the San Carlos community, Grant Moore is now helping to organize a celebration for the school’s semicentennial from 10 a.m. to noon on Saturday, Sept. 26.
The celebration is open to current and former Dailard students, teachers, staff, families and community members.
The event program features student performances, the presentation of a time capsule and a timeline of old photos and yearbooks documenting the school’s history.
Grant Moore dug up photos from the original dedication of the school, which is named after former San Diego Unified School District Superintendent Ralph Dailard.
She said the same lectern she photographed at the dedication ceremony in 1976 will be used for speakers at the 50th anniversary celebration.
“So in some ways, it has stayed a lot the same,” Grant Moore said.
The Dailard School Foundation, a parent-teacher organization that organizes fundraisers and events for the school, is the main group working on the event.
Janine Zuniga, co-communications chair for the foundation, said she’s hoping the semicentennial will allow former students to reconnect with one another and meet the younger generation of students and families.
“It’s a really great community school,” Zuniga said. “They really are focused on just making the best students, scholastically and all around.”
Grant Moore said the neighborhood owes a lot of its community feel to the elementary school.
She said that when she moved to San Carlos in the 1970s, most of her neighbors had school-age children who walked to school and played in the streets.
“There was a kind of lapse in that community feeling for a while because the kids got up to a certain age and moved away,” she said.
“But now, I think that’s returned. We just seem to have a lot more younger people in the neighborhood than we did for a while.”
