Franklin Early Childhood Center in Hewlett has a new addition to the playground

How can children bond and make friends?

Next to the playground at Franklin Early Childhood Center is what former Hewlett-Woodmere school district Superintendent Bert Nelson hopes will be the answer: a Buddy Bench.

Donated by Nelson and his children, the bench is designed to be welcoming for students who feel left out on the playground and in need of companionship.

“The idea of the buddy bench is to sit down and wait for someone to join you and start a conversation,” Nelson said. “It’s really a nice, easy, natural way to connect with one another and to interact in a very natural environment for children.”

Nelson was the district’s superintendent from 1982 to 1998, and helped create the early-childhood center based on research conducted by Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. Piaget’s four-step theory of cognitive development details the changes in children’s intelligence as they grow. Nelson focused on the second step, the “preoperational” stage, in which a pair of 7-year-olds might use symbols to represent words, images and ideas.

“I wondered whether we would better serve the younger children if we brought them all together instead of spreading them around,” he recalled. “There were four elementary schools in the earlier days. With the creation of Franklin Early Childhood Center, we were able to focus on what the needs of the kids were.”

This past school year, the district celebrated its 125th anniversary, and the center marked 40 years.

“You look back over a career and you ask, how did it go? What do I feel very proud of?” Nelson said. “Well, the creation of the early-childhood center is something I’m proud about. There are children who are second or third generation in their family who are now in an early-childhood center that didn’t exist.”

The bench, however, was not Nelson’s idea. His children came up with it. “I’m inspired by my dad and I’m just proud to say it,” his daughter Julie Robeson, a member of the Hewlett High School Class of 1984, said. “I’m always talking about my dad and my childhood, and because of it, I became a teacher.”

Robeson, who now lives in Florida after retiring from teaching, said the idea for the bench arose because she and her siblings, Adam and Rebecca, also teachers, are all about children’s inclusivity. They presented the idea to their dad as an 80th birthday gift last August, along with a song they had written, which they called “A Bench for Dad.”

The idea and the song, Robeson said, made her father tear up. “He kind of had a little tear in his eye,” she said. “So we’re like, ‘We did a good job.’”

That same month, she got in contact with the center’s secretary, Dolores Pugliese, who said that the staff loved the idea. Though Robeson had never attended, she knew how important the center was to her father.

The bench was installed last month, and Robeson and her siblings were there with their father, who still lives in Hewlett.

“On behalf of the district, I would like to thank Dr. Nelson and his family for this wonderful addition to the Franklin Early Childhood Center landscape,” Ralph Marino Jr., the current superintendent of Hewlett-Woodmere Public Schools, said. “For years to come, this special Buddy Bench will encourage our youngest students to embrace kindness and friendship.”