“Sam! It’s your daddy,” exclaimed an excited young middle school girl as a Navy master chief approached our yellow school bus stopped at the main gate of the Submarine Base.

Indeed, it was Samantha’s father who was assigned to the base security department. A significant number of the students on the bus were, like Sam, Navy dependents. Fitch Middle School, where I taught, served Navy housing. The other youngsters on the bus were students at Mystic Middle School, which was our partner school that year in the extra curricular program called the Amistad Friendship Society, sponsored by LEARN, a regional education service center located in Old Lyme.

The Amistad Friendship Society was created in response to the Sheff v. O’Neill suit in 1989 which essentially said that students in schools with high minority enrollments because of economics, didn’t receive the same education as youngsters in suburban schools. The goal was to have kids from the various schools, some of which were primarily white, interact with their peers from schools with diverse populations. My classes were almost always very diverse and I liked that. Participating towns included Stonington, Groton, Ledyard, North Stonington, New London, Montville and Norwich.

The program was loosely based on the story of the Amistad revolt and the abolitionist movement. There were weekly activities in each school and frequent meetings involving two or more schools, which is why children from Mystic Middle School were on a bus with kids from Fitch. Although the two schools were only a few miles apart, for some of the kids it was like two different worlds.

The mother of one of my students, who lived in Navy housing, knowing that I always fed my kids milk and cookies before our meetings, invited me to have the bus stop at her house in housing so that the Mystic kids could see where the Navy kids lived. So, that day instead of getting cookies from a store shelf, they got them right out of the oven, and they were very good!

Then it was on to the base for our prearranged visit. Sam’s father got on our bus and gave us a pretty good tour of the base. All my Navy kids were familiar with the upper base, but few, if any, of the Mystic kids had ever been on the facility. They learned that the submarine base had a hospital, barracks and a dining hall, a bank, a department store, a grocery store, a swimming pool, a library, a theater and its own police department. Then, the master chief was able to take us to the lower base, on the other side of chain link fence and railroad tracks, an area with very restricted access. There the kids could see submarines up close.

The program included a variety of field trips. One of my favorites was Old Sturbridge Village, which is set at about the same time period as the Amistad incident and now has a youth tour focused on the abolitionist movement.

School groups arrived at the education entrance. At that time there was a long footbridge over a ravine connecting the education building to the rest of the village. One sixth grade girl was scared to cross that bridge. I told her to close her eyes and I would hold her hand until we got to the other side. We made it safely!

One important trip was the visit to the Prudence Crandall Museum in Canterbury. Miss Crandall operated a boarding school for girls in that town. When she accepted a Black student in 1832, the parents of the white students withdrew their daughters. She then reopened the school as an institution for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color. Between the hostility of the townspeople and the passage of the Black Laws, she was eventually forced to close her school and move away.

What was confusing to the students is that Andrew Judson, a state representative who was a leader in the opposition to the Crandall school, who was later appointed a judge, ruled in favor of the Amistad captives, saying that they were free Africans and not slaves. This ruling, of course, was appealed by the government and led to the case being heard by the Supreme Court.

On one visit to Canterbury, Fitch Middle had been partnered with West Side Middle School, also a Groton school. Jan, the Amistad leader from West Side, lived not far from the museum. It seemed a little silly for her to drive all the way to Groton, only to get on a bus and come back to Canterbury. We arranged that I would pick up her kids for her at West Side and then get my kids at Fitch. On Friday afternoon Jan delivered her permission slips and meds to me at Fitch. I then turned them over to her at the museum. When we returned on Saturday afternoon, I dropped off my kids at Fitch, ensuring that they all had rides, and then rode the bus to West Side, where I had left my car. That was a good trip in that I didn’t have to wait for missing parents at either school.

Our visits to Roseland Cottage in Woodstock were surprising to the youngsters because they had to put booties on over their shoes in order to save the carpeting. The house, a Gothic revival style building painted pink, had been built by Henry Chandler Bowen in 1846 as a summer home. The connection with the Amistad is that Mr. Bowen had worked for Lewis Tappan, a famous New York abolitionist who was active in the movement to free the African captives.

Other than the booties, what the kids probably remember most about the visit is that one of the outbuildings hosted a bowling alley!

One trip we took with my kids was to Newport, Rhode Island. My wife joined me on this visit. While Newport is probably best known for the mansions, it was also a major center of the slave trade. At one time a fifth of the residents were slaves, though to be sure, the life of an enslaved person in Newport was not the same as one working on a cotton or sugar plantation.

None of my kids had been to Newport before. I told them the houses were a little nicer than Navy housing. The look on their faces when we went through the gates of the Marble House was priceless!

As we wandered around the town, looking for clam chowder for Samantha, we passed Trinity Church, built in 1726, where my wife explained she had attended Sunday School when they lived in Newport, where her father was an instructor at the War College.

We took them to Touro Synagogue, the oldest in New England, completed in 1763. The building is not square on the lot but faces east toward Jerusalem. This was the first time any of my youngsters had been in a synagogue. They learned that Washington had visited Touro in August 1790, after Rhode Island ratified the Constitution.

And, of course, my wife and the girls went shopping. Sam found her chowder.

As the name of the organization implies, we were very interested in the construction of the Amistad replica at Mystic Seaport. The keel was made from purple heart wood from French Guiana. As my wife was interested in natural dying, we gathered shavings and the kids pounded them with hammers before they were put in dye kettles. Disappointingly, the resulting dye was not purple, but a sort of brown.

When the vessel was finished it was sprayed with water from the T. W. Lane, an antique hand pumper owned by the Hoxie Engine Company, to swell the planks to prevent leaks. One of my students’ fathers was a professional firefighter, so Bill Peterson, the senior curator, and a member of the Mystic Fire Department, who had organized the operation, let her hold the nozzle for a while. She did get a lot of help!

We took all the kids over one afternoon to watch the filming of a scene from Spielberg’s Amistad movie. They had been warned that watching a movie being filmed was, as the old adage goes, about as exciting as watching paint dry. At least one kid tried to curl up and take a nap. When they later saw the movie they laughed at the scene where a horse galloped out of the Seaport and seconds later was in Newport.

Readers may have noticed that I often spoke of the girls. While I did have some male students involved, the membership at Fitch and at some of the other schools, tended to be mostly girls. One afternoon I asked them about that. I said to them, “This is an organization based on the story of captured Africans revolting against their enslavers, killing them with cane knives, and throwing the bloody bodies overboard. And I’m looking at a dozen little girls. Why?”

One girl responded that the name of the group, the Amistad Friendship Society, simply sounded like a girl thing. Another very bright student said, “Boys have asked us if they could join and we told them yes, but they had to wear a dress.” That youngster has since earned a doctorate!

At one point the school moved me to portable classroom 402. As I recall it was Team 8B. Bonnie, a seasoned math teacher, was in 403 and the rooms had a connecting door. At the beginning of the year teachers were all asked to post their classroom rules. Some teachers had lengthy lists. I only had three rules: Be safe, be polite, be prepared. As I was hanging up the poster, Bonnie stepped in. She read my rules and invited me into 403 to see the ones she had hung up. They were almost identical to mine.

LEARN had set up something for the Amistad groups at the Seaport one Saturday in the spring. Unfortunately, my naval reserve duties required that I be at the base that Saturday morning, so I asked Bonnie if she would cover for me until I was done at the base. She agreed and I arranged for permission slips and meds. Shortly after lunch time I was able to get to the Seaport and relieve Bonnie, who told me she had enjoyed herself.

When I spoke with her on Monday morning, she told me what a nice bunch of little girls I had, and that she planned to teach for at least a couple of more years so that she could have them in class. She did and those kids were just as nice as eighth graders as they were in sixth. grade.

I stayed with the program until 2007 when the state no longer funded it. But it was a lot of fun while it lasted!

Robert F. Welt is a retired Groton Public Schools teacher who lives in Mystic.