Shelton Students Observe Veterans Day

When veterans showed up for breakfast at Shelton Intermediate School for its Veterans Day observance Monday, they were delighted to find a full-size mockup of the city’s veterans’ memorial waiting for them in the lobby.

The ambitious art project was part of the school’s effort to turn the holiday into a meaningful learning experience, which also included a multi-media presentation of history and poetry in the school auditorium.

I wanted to give them the opportunity to express themselves,” said social studies department chairman and enrichment specialist Robert Ayer.

The presentation, showing appreciation to local armed forces veterans for their military service, took more than a month to create. Ayer said the students, guided by their teachers, not only had to research the history of the nation’s wars from World War I onward, but also had to learn how to write poems and create multi-media slide shows to accompany their bullet-point accounts of American history.

They seemed like bullet-point presentations because the students were given the task of keeping them each to a single page.

As the intermediate school students read their poems and histories during an assembly in the auditorium, clippings from the former Evening Sentinel newspaper from 1943 – 1945 about men and women from Shelton who had gone off to serve their country were projected on a screen behind them.

Most of the invited veterans were relatives of Shelton Intermediate School students. Another presentation for all the students in the school was scheduled for Monday afternoon.

It has been several years since the Shelton Board of Education decided to hold classes on Veterans Day instead of giving the children and staff a holiday. That decision was initially met with opposition by veterans, who felt it was disrespectful to their military service.

But other veterans have long complained that few Americans seemed to understand the meaning of Veterans Day and that the holiday had become little more than an opportunity for retail store sales.

Ayer said he could tell that the students at Shelton Intermediate School had gained a much deeper understanding of how important veterans have been for preserving American freedom and helping to free other countries from tyranny.

It was fortunate that the students started their work at the beginning of October, because the project faced a serious interruption from Hurricane Sandy, which closed Shelton schools for several days. 

One of the projects affected the most by the storm was the construction of the mockup monuments, life-size replicas of the actual memorials at Veterans Park at the Riverwalk in Shelton center.

Ayer said he and Assistant Principal Carolyn Ivanoff measured and photographed the monuments and turned that over to introduction to engineering teacher Bob Lutka and art teacher Sue Weir, who guided the team of students.

The replicas were constructed out of wood and Styrofoam, and then painted to look like the actual monuments for World War One, World War Two, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, complete with the names of the war dead on the back and the etched scene of the conflict on the front.

They might have to construct another one soon. Prominent veterans advocate Al Sabetta said plans are in the works to add a fifth monument to remember U.S. Army 1st Lt. Thomas Brown, who was killed in action in 2008 while on patrol in Iraq.

Sabetta said a plaque and a bench was added to the memorial on Sunday to remember Brown, but a monument to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars would be added with his name on it once all of our troops have come home.

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