Local History
Forty-Eight Children in One Room: How Bohemia’s Schools Became Connetquot
From a $600 schoolhouse on a sand road to a central district of ten schools — the buildings, the votes, and the names on the doors
Every weekday morning about five thousand children go to school in a district named after a river none of them cross to get there. The name is roughly a hundred and sixty years newer than the oldest district it absorbed, and the number that follows it — District No. 7 — is older still. This is the story of how a handful of one-room schoolhouses in three separate hamlets became one district, and where the names on the buildings came from.
Before the Schoolhouse
School Was Wherever Someone Would Teach
Long before there was a Bohemia district, there was an Islip town system that grew outward district by district as settlement spread. Oakdale was carved out of the East Islip district in 1836 and given a number of its own: District No. 7. Lakeland — the settlement around the north end of the lake, later renamed Ronkonkoma — became District No. 11 in 1855.
Bohemia had neither. For its first decade the Czech families who took up land in the scrub oak taught their children in kitchens and front rooms, wherever a willing teacher and a spare room could be found. That was not unusual for a new settlement, and it was not a sign of indifference — it was the arrangement available to people who did not yet have a building for anything.
It is worth noticing what that meant practically. Instruction happened in Czech and in English depending on who was teaching. There was no schedule the whole settlement kept, no fixed term, and no building the community could point to and call its own. Everything about Bohemia’s later habit of building institutions by subscription — the fire company, the halls, the churches — was rehearsed first on the problem of where to put the children.
1867
Six Hundred Dollars, One Room, Forty-Eight Children
In 1867 the village pooled its money and built a one-room wooden schoolhouse for $600 — roughly $11,000 in today’s money, and a very large sum for farming families who were still clearing pitch pine by hand. The district was designated District No. 8. The first teacher was hired at $180 a year to instruct forty-eight children.
Set those two figures beside each other. Forty-eight children, every grade, one teacher, one room, one stove — and the teacher’s entire annual salary was less than a third of what the building cost. The arithmetic tells you what the community was actually buying. It was buying a building. The teaching was what it could afford after that.
The building did more than school. With no church and no town hall yet standing, the schoolhouse was the first roof the whole village could gather under — meeting place, polling place, and public room. Bohemia’s civic life effectively began in a single-room school.
Growth was slow enough to be measured in dozens. A state accounting in 1883 put the three districts that would one day be Connetquot at sixteen students in Lakeland, thirty-five in Bohemia, and forty-nine in Oakdale — one hundred pupils across the whole future district. Older students who wanted more than the local school could give generally went to Sayville, and a good many Bohemia and Oakdale children graduated from Sayville High School.
A Note on the Record
Was Bohemia District 8 or District 14?
Both numbers appear in the record, and we would rather say so than pick one quietly. Local accounts, including this Society’s, have long given Bohemia as District No. 8, founded in 1867. Patrick J. Curran’s 1971 doctoral history of public education in the Town of Islip gives Bohemia as District No. 14, founded in 1866, and adds that Bohemia absorbed part of the Lakeland district that same year.
Neither is obviously wrong. New York school districts were numbered by town, and towns renumbered as districts were created, merged and dissolved — a district could hold two different numbers across its life without anyone considering it a new district. A one-year gap between a district being organized and its schoolhouse being finished is also ordinary. The likeliest reading is that the community was authorized in 1866 and opened its building in 1867, and that the number changed at some point in a town-wide renumbering. We have not found the document that would settle it, and we would like to.
1903
The School on Church Street — and What Became of the Old One
By the turn of the century the one room was not enough. In 1903 the community voted to build a larger two-story wooden schoolhouse on Church Street at a cost of a little over $3,000 — five times what the 1867 building had cost, from a village that had grown but was not rich.
The old schoolhouse was not torn down. It was sold at auction for $100 to Frank Cervenka, moved down to Locust Avenue, and put back to work as a grocery store. Bohemia’s first public building spent its second life selling flour and tobacco to the same families whose children had learned to read in it. That store is the subject of its own page, Cervenka’s Market.
The Church Street school served as the village’s school for the next sixty years, and it is the building most Bohemia residents born before the war mean when they say “the schoolhouse.” It outlasted the district that built it.
1918
The First Consolidation: Oakdale-Bohemia
In 1918, Oakdale and Bohemia consolidated. The combined district took the name Oakdale-Bohemia and the legal form of a union free school district — Union Free School District No. 7, carrying forward the number Oakdale had held since 1836.
“Union free” is a phrase worth unpacking, because it sounds like it means the opposite of what it means. It does not mean free of anything. It means two or more common school districts united, and freed from the restriction that kept common districts to elementary grades — a union free district could operate a high school. That was the whole point of the form, and it is why growing communities across Long Island reached for it.
Oakdale-Bohemia did not build one. For another four decades its older students kept going out of district, most of them to Sayville. A generation of Bohemia children grew up knowing that finishing school meant leaving the hamlet every morning — which is the grievance that eventually produced Connetquot High School, and it took forty-two years to produce it.
The Other Half
Lakeland Becomes Ronkonkoma
North of Bohemia, the district around the lake had its own history. Organized in 1855 as District No. 11 and called Lakeland, it changed its name to Ronkonkoma in 1867 — the same year Bohemia opened its schoolhouse. Its territory came out of the old Holbrook district, most of which is Sachem today, which is why the boundary between Connetquot and Sachem still runs where it does.
Ronkonkoma spent the nineteenth century as the smallest of the three — sixteen students in 1883 — and the twentieth century becoming the largest. Lake Ronkonkoma drew summer people, then the railroad drew commuters, then the postwar subdivisions filled in everything between. By the 1950s the district that had been a rounding error was the one generating the enrollment pressure.
June 1960
The Vote
The baby boom broke the arrangement. Bohemia’s population had tripled since the end of the Second World War; Ronkonkoma’s subdivisions were going up faster than classrooms could be added; and neither district could build a high school alone. In June 1960 the voters of Oakdale-Bohemia and Ronkonkoma approved consolidation. The result was the Connetquot Central School District No. 7. The New York Times carried it on June 24, 1960, under the flat headline “School Consolidation Voted.”
Four words that dispose of a genuinely contentious fight. Centralization votes on Long Island in this period were rarely quiet, and the objections were not unreasonable ones. A district that centralizes gives up its own board, its own budget, and its own say over its own schoolhouse; its tax base is pooled with a neighbor’s; and its children may be bused past a building their parents paid for to a building somewhere else. Small districts that had run themselves for a century were being asked to vote themselves out of existence, and many across the Island refused more than once before agreeing.
What we can say with confidence is that Bohemia, Oakdale and Ronkonkoma argued the question hard and then settled it at the ballot box, and that the argument was about something real. What we cannot yet say is how close the vote was, who led which side, or how many times the question was put before it passed. That is a gap in our records, and it is the gap we would most like readers to help close.
1962–1963
Scarlet Fever, and a High School on Seventh Street
The new district’s first appearance in the national press was not a happy one. In January 1962 an outbreak of scarlet fever closed every school in Connetquot for a week. The Times put the number of pupils affected at 2,538 — a useful census, taken by accident, of what the district actually held two years after the merger.
In 1963 the thing the merger had been for finally opened: Connetquot High School, on Seventh Street in Bohemia. For the first time since the settlement began, a Bohemia child could complete an education without leaving the hamlet. The building’s scale was the point — it was sized not for the 1963 enrollment but for the subdivisions still being framed out, and it announced that the district expected to keep growing.
Because the high school is the visible landmark, 1963 is often given as the district’s founding date. The vote that created it was 1960. Both dates are defensible; they answer different questions.
1974
The Church Street School Burns
With modern buildings open across the new district, the old schoolhouse on Church Street stopped holding daily classes in the 1960s — silent during school hours for the first time in sixty years. In 1974 it was lost to fire.
Its bell survived, and remains one of the village’s landmarks. It is the only physical object left from more than a century of Bohemia’s own schools — the 1867 building having gone to Locust Avenue and then, in time, gone entirely. A district that once fit in one room now runs ten schools, and what it has to show from the beginning is a bell.
The Names
Where the School Names Came From
The district’s names fall into three groups: one river, several streets and places, and four people.
Connetquot comes from the Connetquot River, and the river’s name is Algonquian, from the Secatogue people who lived along it. It is generally rendered “great river” — which is why the hamlet at its mouth is called Great River, the same name twice in two languages. The choice was a diplomatic one. Naming the merged district after Bohemia or Oakdale or Ronkonkoma would have handed the argument to one of the three; naming it after the water they shared handed it to none of them.
Oakdale-Bohemia Middle School keeps the name of the 1918 union alive on a building that opened long after it. Every student who passes through it is attending a school named for a merger that happened a century ago.
Ronkonkoma Middle School takes its name from the lake, and the lake from an Algonquian expression — written in early records as Raconkumake and Raconkamuck — usually rendered “boundary fishing-lake.” The lake sat on the line between the Nissequogue, Setauket, Secatogue and Unkechaug territories, and it has gone on being a boundary ever since: the modern line between Connetquot and Sachem runs near it.
Idle Hour Elementary is named for its neighborhood, and the neighborhood for William K. Vanderbilt’s Oakdale estate. Vanderbilt bought some nine hundred acres in 1878 and called the house Idle Hour; the mansion standing today was completed in 1901 after fire destroyed the first. The estate was subdivided after his death in 1920, and the suburb that grew up on it kept the name. A public elementary school in Oakdale is therefore named, at two removes, after a Gilded Age millionaire’s word for leisure.
Cherokee Street and Sycamore Avenue elementary schools are named, simply and directly, for the streets they stand on — the plainest naming convention there is, and the one that tells you a building went up fast in a decade when the district was opening schools as quickly as it could pour foundations.
The four schools named for people are John Pearl, Helen B. Duffield, Edith L. Slocum and Edward J. Bosti. John Pearl we have written about separately, in The Man Behind the Name: John Pearl — an educator who began his career in a one-room schoolhouse in Centereach in 1925 and ended it as a name over a door in Bohemia, which is the whole arc of this article compressed into one life.
The other three we cannot yet document, and we are not going to guess. Districts of this era typically honored long-serving teachers, principals, superintendents and board members, and it is a fair assumption that Duffield, Slocum and Bosti were people of that kind — but an assumption is not a record, and the families of these three deserve better than a plausible sentence. If you know who they were, we would like to hear from you.
2023–2025
One More Name: The T-Bird
The district has carried the thunderbird as its mascot since the 1960s, adopted at the same moment as the river name and in the same spirit. In 2023 the New York State Board of Regents moved to bar school mascots drawn from Native American imagery, and Connetquot sued rather than drop it. The matter was settled in September 2025: the district keeps the emblem under the shortened name “T-Bird,” the form most people in Bohemia had been using for sixty years anyway.
People felt strongly on both sides, and this Society takes no position on the merits. What is worth recording is the pattern: the district’s identity has been argued over publicly in every generation that had to decide something — 1918, 1960, 2023 — and each time the argument ended in a vote.
Today
District No. 7, Still
Connetquot today runs a preschool, seven elementary schools, two middle schools and a high school, with an enrollment of 5,393 in the 2022–23 school year. It covers all of Oakdale, nearly all of Ronkonkoma and Bohemia, and parts of Islandia, Sayville and West Sayville. Its administration building sits in Bohemia.
And it is still District No. 7 — the number Oakdale was given in 1836, when it was cut loose from East Islip and told to educate its own children. It survived the 1918 union and the 1960 centralization without changing. Ninety years of consolidation politics rearranged nearly everything about how this corner of Islip goes to school, and left the number alone.
Help Us Fill In the Blanks
A great deal of this history is thinner in the record than it should be. We would like to know who Helen B. Duffield, Edith L. Slocum and Edward J. Bosti were, when their schools were dedicated, and whether any dedication program survives. We would like the tally from the 1960 centralization vote, the names of the people who campaigned for and against it, and whether the question was put to voters more than once.
We would also like to settle the district-number question — District No. 8 or No. 14 — with an actual document, and to know the name of the teacher hired in 1867 for $180 a year. And we would be glad of photographs: the 1867 schoolhouse before it became a store, the Church Street building before the 1974 fire, class portraits, report cards, or the bell in its earlier settings.
If you attended the Church Street school, taught in the district before or after the merger, or have papers in a family box, please contact the Society. Corrections are welcome and encouraged — the people who lived it know it better than any document does.
Sources: Patrick J. Curran, “A History of Public Education in the Town of Islip, New York” (PhD diss., North Texas State University, 1971); “School Consolidation Voted,” The New York Times, June 24, 1960; “5 L.I. Schools Close; Scarlet Fever Outbreak Hits Connetquot District,” The New York Times, January 18, 1962; Connetquot Central School District; Bohemia Historical Society, “The Story of Bohemia,” “The 1870s: Clearing the Path & The First School,” and “The 1960s: Growing Pains & A New Identity.”
A note on the images: several illustrations on this page are AI recreations, built from small, poor-quality photographs of the actual buildings in the Society’s collection. They are close to the originals in form and detail, but they are reconstructions, not archival photographs, and no person shown in them should be taken for a portrait of a particular individual. Where an original photograph exists, it is used and captioned as such. If you hold a better print of any of these buildings, we would very much like to see it.