Buried Treasure

DAYTON — It was the year 1999 — with threats of the Y2K, or “Millennium bug,” on the horizon, and with advances into GPS making the technology available to the masses, Dayton Elementary School’s supervising teacher Casey Love came up with an idea.

He wanted to bury a time capsule, and recruited the rest of the Dayton school to chip in.

“It was geocaching before geocaching was cool,” Love said. “That, combined with the millennium coming around, we thought this would be a fun activity to do with a really good group of kids.”

Students brought in items they felt were important in the year 1999, and many of those items, the students wrote in a book about the project, might not be around in the future. Small toys, a $2 bill, credit cards and a paper clip were just a few of the time capsule’s inclusions.

Shane Leineke, who was in first grade at the time, wrote that his contribution was a styrofoam ball because he’d forgotten his Pokemon cards and it would remind him how forgetful he was.

Made out of a PVC pipe and wrapped in a plastic trash bag, the capsule sat under the cold earth, filled with tokens of the past, all but forgotten — well, forgotten by some.

“We always talked about it,” said Tanya Leineke, a graduate of Dayton’s elementary school and one of the group of students who’d contributed to the time capsule buried 13 years ago in the schoolyard.

Leineke and several of her former classmates were reunited last week when word spread through the online social media site, Facebook, that Love had plans to dig it up.

Her brother, Shane, maybe wished he’d stayed home Thursday afternoon because after more than 30 minutes of digging, pulling, pushing and swirling the vertical pipe around in the dirt, the pipe was still packed so tightly that it couldn’t be removed.

“Advice for next time, don’t dig it so deep,” one student said as beads of sweat dripped from Leineke’s forehead.

Love and Leineke worked for a few more minutes before the pair was able to unearth the buried treasure, which was covered in the signatures of its makers and immediately passed around the group of young Dayton students, all eager to touch the relic.

“I was within just a few inches of finding it,” Love said, admitting he was a little nervous that the GPS coordinates he’d logged so many years ago wouldn’t be accurate.

Once inside the school, the items were removed: a toy truck, pencil and floppy disk, even a real robin’s egg seated in a small basket — they’d all survived. Better yet, they looked brand new.

One student had put in a photo of the school and said her reason was because the school itself might not be around in 13 years. And it almost wasn’t, teacher Nichole Fant said. They almost closed the Dayton school three years later, due to low enrollment.

“There were only about three or four kids in ‘03-’04,” Fant said. “The next year, we went around to the houses, knocking on doors and got home schoolers; Julie Berry helped us set up an afterschool program and that is really what allowed us to stay open.”

Now, the Dayton school educates between 30 and 50 students each year. Recently, the state Office of Public Instruction awarded the Upper West Shore Elementary School (the school’s official name) an award for not having missed AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress) in 13 years.

While the tube of 13-year-old shimmery lip gloss didn’t taste very good, and no one tried to eat the Rugrats gummies that were extracted from the time capsule, the project was deemed a clear success from everyone involved.

On Wednesday, current Dayton classes had plans to put it back into the ground, stuffed with a new round of treasures from the year 2012.

This time, however, they will be careful not to bury it so deep.