Gene Ricci

Here is an article and picture from 1974 featuring Willard School teacher Gene Ricci. This one will make Jim Schoneman of the class of 1974 very nostalgic. It is from the Official Publication of The Ridgewood Public Schools:

"Gene Ricci (pronounced Ritchie) is known in the Willard School area as "the plant doctor." Parents and students bring their ailing plants to school to see if his green thumb can spark new life into a wilting hibiscus or a fading gardenia. Thousands of plants are raised by the children in his sixth grade classroom each year in an elaborate greenhouse he has rigged up along the classroom windows. Because of Ricci's knowledge and enthusiasm for plant life, floriculture has become a popular part of the school's sixth grade curriculum and his plant club has more than forty students on its waiting list.


Ricci is a "late bloomer" in the teaching profession. As a boy growing up in Pennsylvania he learned meat cutting as a family trade. He worked his way through college as head chef at a fashionable restaurant and is still a gourmet cook. He became a bookkeeper and a business manager in the years after his high school graduation in 1944. An opportunity to teach course for an industrial corporation led him ot decide that his real vocation was teaching. He had always had a special rapport with children, and he decided to go back to college in 1960 and prepare himself for a teaching career. He now holds a B.A. and an M.A. from William Paterson College in the field of elementary education with a concentration in mathematics. He has been attending courses in floriculture at the North Jersey Institute of Applied Horticulture to advance his knowledge of botany.


Gene came to Willard as a practice teacher in 1964 and has stayed ever since, first as a fourth grade teacher and now in the sixth grade. In what he calls "The Willard System" he teaches mathematics to homogeneous groups, and science to all sixth graders. The other sixth grade teachers are responsible for language arts and social sciences for the entire grade as well as special sections in mathematics. He feels that this plan gives Willard "the best of team teaching, the best of departmentalization, and the best of the self-contained classroom."