The HENRY H. DAVIS School was built in 1925 at 3425 Cramer Street in East Camden. The school was designed by architect Benjamin Howell Lackey, and was featured in the book that the firm of Lackey & Hettel. Inc. published shortly thereafter. The school is named after Dr. Henry Hill Davis, a Camden physician. He was a school board member, Camden's first medical inspector, and first chief medical inspector. His work in the areas of school health and nutrition saved countless lives of the young children in Camden. 

The Henry H. Davis School was accepted by the Board of Education on July 26, 1926, and dedicated on October 2. It replaced the old Rosedale School on 32nd Street near Westfield Avenue, which came into the school district with the annexation of Stockton Township in 1899. This school was reopened in 1928 to serve crippled and handicapped children. The first principal was Minerva C. Stackhouse. She held the position until her retirement in June of 1933.

The Davis school has for many years served the students of East Camden, including the Rosedale and Westfield Acres neighborhoods. 

Camden Courier-Post - June 16, 2003

By LAVINIA DeCASTRO
Courier-Post Staff

College could not prepare Karen Borrelli for her first job - teaching physical education to disabled students at Camden County Vocational Technical School.

"Back then, there were basically no resources to tell you how to teach them," Borrelli said. "You just had to figure things out, like how do I get you to run a 50-meter dash if you can't see."

She did figure it out.

And nearly 30 years later, she is still helping disabled athletes to excel, this time as a Special Olympics Team USA coach.

Borrelli, a physical education teacher at Dr. Henry H. Davis School, is one of five people coaching 15 New Jersey athletes who will represent the United States in the Special Olympics World Summer Games in Ireland.

The delegation left Sunday for Belfast. They'll practice there the rest of the week. The games begin Saturday in Dublin.

"I didn't even know there was a Team USA," said Borrelli, a Lindenwold resident. "Then I got a letter saying `You've been nominated' . . . I didn't even know what was involved."

What's involved is a lot of work.

"She spends a lot of time after school," said Florence Gavin cq, principal of Davis School. "At least six months out of the year she has kids coming in here from 3 to 4:30, and that's all volunteer."

And that's also just part of Borrelli's regular Special Olympics activities, such as the roller hockey team she coaches and summer camp she organizes.

To coach the athletes in the World Summer Games, she had to attend six training camps and travel to Special Olympics' New Jersey headquarters in Lawrenceville once a week the past two months.

During the training period, she's had a chance to share the experience with athletes such as 25-year-old Jason Clark, a Washington Township resident who plays table tennis.

Borrelli and Clark are the only members of the New Jersey delegation making their first trip to the World Summer Games.

"They picked a good year," said George Clark, Jason's father, noting this is the first time the games will be held outside the United States.

Ron Blizard's East Camden Stories

By Ron Blizard
February 2011

One of the most unusual and unique teachers I ever had was at Davis Jr. High School back in the mid-sixties. Mr. Motzer taught 9th grade Latin. He had a long craggy face with thinning hair greased and combed straight back, often badly colored with what his students commonly assumed was black shoe polish. He was undoubtedly Irish-Catholic and a product of the Catholic education system, perhaps the Jesuits. How he got marooned teaching at Davis is a story that is unknown. One wonders if he befell the common trip stones for Irishmen of the bottle or women or both.

He was loud, colorful, passionate, opinionated, intimidating, and a strict disciplinarian. Any male student full of their adolescence he would call to the front of the class with disdain in his voice, saying, "Come here sonny boy" and proceed dress them down in front of the whole class.

In his class he expounded on his principles, the first and foremost was, "Children, your religion comes first". It seemed quaint even back then before the mention or support for any traditional faith in the public schools had not advanced to the crazed politically correct hostility we know today. He usually reaffirmed that principle around holidays, whether Jewish or Christian, as his way of being non-sectarian.

He would shamelessly flirt with Miss Ryan, our gray-haired spinster librarian, calling her "the apple of my eye" whenever she entered the room. She would even beam up a smile on her otherwise dour face at such obsequious and flattering attention. No doubt she was embarrassed but still liked being appreciated by a man, no matter how weird or homely an admirer.

He was no less effusive in his praise of men, calling Dr. Ferren, his proctologist, "One of the nicest men God ever gave breath to". That was the highest praise he could bestow on his fellows. His worst epithet for someone he disapproved of was to call them a "yahoo", that Swiftian denigration that has fallen out of popular language. 

Mr. Motzer tried to instill in his students a sense of integrity. He drilled into us the nominative declentions and verbal conjugations of Latin inflections ("Children, you must get your perfect passive participle"), but the ardors of translating even simple sentences from Latin led to a lot of homework sharing in homeroom. Somehow he found out about it. That morning he closed the door to his classroom and was so overwhelmed with indignation and disappointment that he went into an apoplectic fit and couldn’t even get words out of his mouth. No one who was there will ever forget it.

Despite all his eccentricities, the thing that we all understood was that he cared. His pedagogical methodology was rote memorization and drill. It worked – I can still recite the first two declensions even today. Mr. Motzer is an example of one of my most firmly held convictions: that people are not remembered in this life because of their title or how much money they make, but because of who they are, because of the principles they live by..