Pacegiving is a tradition where the school celebrates Thanksgiving as a community. Pacegiving includes morning advisory activities and an assembly with performances and competitive challenges to find out which grade gets to eat first.

Pacegiving has been around for 17 years and everybody loves to celebrate it but with new students and teachers coming into Pace every year. The school community believes that they had to show them what Pacegiving is.

Ms. Watkins said, “I had so much fun and the students seem to have tons of fun as well. I don’t know what previous years were like, but I thought this year Pacegiving was wonderful.”

Freshman Joshua Santiago said, “It was a great event where we got to experience performances by students and watch the grades compete.”
Pacegiving was started by Yvette Sy, the founding principal of Pace. She was the assistant principal at M.S.131 and she took their tradition and implemented it in Pace.

The first assistant principal, Larry Gabbard, was the one who made Pacegiving what it is today. He was the advisor of SGO and he started many events and Pace traditions that we know today. He made things well organized and fun, unfortunately he passed away and Mr. Sowiski continued the traditions.

In 2004, something like Pacegiving started but with only around 100 students. Later on it started growing from potluck to catered food. 2007 was the first year Pace had all four grades celebrate together. Even with M.S. 131 and Emma Lazarus High School also doing a Thanksgiving theme community event, Pace does it more festively.

In the early years, Pacegiving was a complete potluck with students and teachers bringing in food for the feast. This year, students were asked to bring desserts and drinks for the meal. For the second year in a row, Don Juan Deli, the popular Dominican lunch spot on Forsyth Street, catered the the meal.