Try selling imprinted bricks that people can buy to dedicate to family that went there or just live in the community and would like to help support the school in a commerative way. Build a walkway or just a small area that will be seen by all who walk into the school. After this project is compleated, you could have a dedication ceremony, inviting community members, school families, past teachers and students. This ceremony could be followed by juice and cookies. You could also plant an evergreen tree, and sell lights. Trees can be donated by a local nursery. Selling lights consists of: selling one light for $1.00, or whatever amount you choose to sell the light at. A name goes on the light by way of a tag, each light would cost one dollar, so affordable if someone wants to buy a light for more than one person, but still affordable if they only want one light per family. The lights can be sold again at the holiday time (the festival of lightstree) to make more money. You could have the winter celebration and offer cookies and hot chocolate inside the school and pics with Santa. At Thanksgiving time you could sell Acorns in a tag version,( the thankful tree) with family name or single names, and have each family member hang their acorn on the tree at a ceremony and once again offer hot apple cider and cookies. Easter time you would hang eggs. St Patricks day would have shamrocks, and so on. Your imagination is the limit. the tags would have to be laminated to withstand weather conditions, then holes punched in them and string added to hang the tag. The tree can be used to raise money throughout the year as a fundraising tree. It starts out as a dedication tree that keeps on giving back to the school. Each holiday can be used to sell something to hang on the tree and have a celebration with it, get community involved by inviting them and including them in each celebration.
A collage like this one could be made from pictures throughout the years (on butcher paper so it can be moved?) and both displayed at a carnival and then later in the school office. Perhaps encourage families and alumni to bring/send photos to the event?
we are having our 50 year school calibration and it is really hard to come up with an idea because our school is very poor so how bout just a fun little party and some punch and all that stuff.
We celebrated our 50th birthday last year as well. We celebrated all year long. We held a t-shirt design contest asking students to design a 50th birthday logo. The winning design was selected and printed on gold shirts (50th color) and we sold these for the kids to wear on Friday. It was great to see the "golden" celebration each week. We had a Talent Show and Dinner in November. Current and past students and teachers entertained the very crowded audience as we ate and enjoyed the show. In March we had a birthday celebration carnival. The colors were pink and black (50's style signs with poodles, skirts and old-fashioned sodas, etc.) A company called Stumps can give you some awesome decorating ideas. Then in May we had a Friday night sock-hop with music in the gym. Everyone dressed up 50s style. Also, that night there was an alumni reception in the library. All the past yearbooks and scrapbooks were displayed along with all the prior t-shirts were draped over the chairs for nostaligia. We had name tags for people to write who they were and how they were affiliated with the school. There were even two men who had attended kindergarten the year our school began. We announced each event in our local weekly neighborhood newspaper and we registered with classmates.com. I was amazed at how many people responded through that website.
Anyway...there's lot of fun things to do for a 50th birthday. If your school did a time capsule when you started - this would be the time to open it. Ours created time capsules every ten years. It was really fun to see what was put in there.
For our school's 50th, we had "distinguished" alumnae come back and talk to the students, which was fun. We also had a soiree had someone's house and I know they worked extensively to update the database of alumnae. They had t-shirts printed up, etc.
Good luck!
SHC
Our school celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2003. We had the local newspaper come out and photograph the students. The photographer took the picture from the roof of our school, looking down at the kids in the parking lot. The students were in the form of a 100. It made the front page of the newspaper. This brought a lot of publicity to our school...and it was free!
