ENGLEWOOD, N.J.—We go back to Englewood in the pre-War World II years for this tale of an April Fool’s Day prank that saw kids vandalize a city elementary school.
The night before April Fool’s Day of 1936, kids entered Cleveland Elementary School—now McCloud School—on Tenafly Road through a rear door that had been left unlocked. They scrawled April Fool’s comments on the blackboards—and perhaps the incident would have been considered humorous if they had left it at that.
The kids did considerable damage when they turned on a water faucet on the third floor and allowed the water to overflow, flooding the floor and soaking through the ceiling to the classroom below.
The kids also broke into a teacher’s desk, apparently on a quest for valuables. They came up empty-handed, however, as teachers had previously been warned not to leave valuable items in their classrooms or desks.
It took police only a few days to identify the culprits, a group of boys from the junior high and Dwight Morrow High School. News clippings from the time do not mention what the boys’ punishment was (we will have to imagine that for ourselves), but it was reported that the damage amounted to about $50, or nearly $1,000 in today’s dollars.
Students from Englewood’s northwest section started attending Cleveland School in 1910. The school is still in use today, but in 2009 it was renamed in memory of Dr. Leroy McCloud. McCloud was the city’s second black teacher and first black principal, and spent nearly 50 years in the school district.
