Her last egg hunt

It’s the end of an era at Brooklyn Avenue School. After 12 years playing the Easter bunny for the annual egg hunt, Janice Fiore is hanging up her rabbit suit.

With her youngest child, daughter Natalie, graduating sixth-grade this year, Fiore’s ties to the District 24 elementary school will end in June. On April 4, Fiore presided over her last Easter egg hunt at the school and she hopes her pink bunny costume will be filled by another parent next year.

Fiore started playing the Easter bunny when her son, Angelo, was in first grade. This year, he graduates South High School. Since Fiore has always had a child in Brooklyn Avenue School for the past dozen years, she was able to reprise her role as Easter’s fuzzy icon every year. “If they weren’t here, I wouldn’t do it,” Fiore said. “It’s my kids, their enjoyment of it.”

For more than a decade, Fiore has led the egg hunt on the front lawn of the school. She and other parent volunteers would cover the grass with plastic eggs, then set the children loose.

With about 330 students in the school, and each child getting to pick up three eggs, that meant buying about 1,000 plastic eggs each year and filling them with candy, such as Tootsie Rolls, Starburst and Hershey’s Chocolate Kisses. Fortunately, she said, the PTA provided the funding for the egg hunt.

Fiore’s favorite part of the egg hunt has always been when the kindergarten classes would come out. Seeing the look of joy on their faces made it worthwhile. “It’s their first year,” she said, “so it’s very exciting.”

The kindergartners also were particularly thrilled to see a giant talking Easter bunny, she added. And even the fifth and sixth-graders still think the egg hunt is “cool and fun,” she said, which might not normally be expected of the older children.

Next year, parent Jacqueline Ross, who has a son and daughter at the school, will take over the egg hunt. She won’t be putting on the bunny costume though — the most she will wear will be some bunny ears. “We’re looking for a bunny,” she said.

Ross, whose husband is co-president of the school’s PTA, said she enjoyed seeing the Easter egg hunt for the first time this year. “It was great,” she said. “The kids were having a lot of fun.”

Fiore said she fell into being the Easter bunny by chance — she fit into the costume. She doesn’t know much about the origins of the bunny suit, but said she thinks it is at least 20 years old and was handmade by another parent.

In addition to her role as the bunny, Fiore has also volunteered her time with the PTA food drive, father/daughter dance and school movie nights. And she also has played the scarecrow for the annual pumpkin patch in the fall, a similar concept to the egg hunt where students get to pick a pumpkin in front of the school.

But being the Easter bunny is her claim to fame. “Visually, I guess, it stands out in most people’s minds,” she said. “It’s time to pass the torch, or the egg.”