Schools

Too much time? Capsule vanishes

Former classmates look for keepsakes after eight years, come up empty-handed

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Fourth grade teacher Ilissa Epstein’s former students gathered at Shaw Avenue Elementary School on June 11 to open a time capsule they buried eight years ago, when they were Epstein’s first class at the school. They hoped to revisit memories when they opened the vessel — but couldn’t find it.

“This is so frustrating,” Epstein said as she and several students plunged shovels into the ground under a window outside her former classroom. A small rock formation marked the spot in the courtyard where the capsule should have been. “I don’t know where else it could have gone.”

The afternoon began with everyone in high spirits. The students, who graduate this year, met after classes let out and shared a small meal, laughing as they remembered memories from their grade school years. They sang songs by boy bands and other pop acts popular at the time, and traded lines from their favorite childhood cartoons and movies.

After they ate, they gathered in a small circle around the dig site. Each of the 16 students shared their fondest memories from their time in Epstein’s class, with many mentioning a singing competition they held that was based on the hit show “American Idol,” and the ghost stories their teacher told them on Halloween.

When it was time to unearth the main attraction, two students, Alex Taylor and Winston Jones, removed the rocks that marked the site and began digging. After a few minutes, they uncovered a small box wrapped in a plastic bag — which contained only bits of garbage.

Frustrations began to mount in the heat of one of the year’s warmest afternoons yet, as the hole widened and more of the area was explored. Epstein and another student, Priscilla Bell, relieved Taylor and Jones, but they didn’t have any luck either. After nearly an hour of digging, Epstein called it off, and the students retreated to the school’s air-conditioned auditorium, where they watched a slideshow of pictures from their fourth-grade class.

No photos were taken during the burial, making the rocks the only indicator of the correct location. Epstein said the capsule itself was a plastic box, so a metal detector wouldn’t pick it up. Most students’ memories of what they left behind was foggy at best, though each remembered writing a letter to their future self.

“That’s incredible,” Taylor said. “Where in the world could it have gone? I just kept digging and expecting to find it, but we couldn’t track it down.”

I think I had buried a necklace,” Bell said. “I also may have put in a DVD, I’m not sure.”

Epstein had assigned the letters as homework, asking them to document their lives during their grade school years—who their closest friends and relatives were; what they enjoyed doing. She also asked them to predict what would happen in the future, and what they hoped they would be doing when the class gathered to open the time capsule.

Taylor’s memories of what he left behind were vague, and he said he was curious to see how his predictions panned out.

“I think I buried some pictures,” he said, though he wasn’t sure. “I know for sure that we wrote letters to ourselves. I can’t remember what I said. I want to see if what I wrote then holds up now.”

Epstein and her students were stumped. A few theories were floated: some thought it may have been compromised during construction or landscaping, while Epstein wondered if someone intentionally removed it.

“We dug and we dug and we dug, but we just couldn’t find anything,” she said. “I really don’t know what happened. We can’t seem to find any explanation. It’s just very weird to me.”