History Connected

As this school year concluded the Wilmington High School’s September 11th Memorial Committee met for the last time until next school year. This group was inspired by last year’s History Connected Seminar which examined historical memorials. Since then, we have been able to organize a group of students who have volunteered their time and effort to help educate, raise awareness, fundraise and design a 9/11 Memorial for new up and coming high school. Meeting once a week our committee kicked off the year with its first fundraising effort which was a memorial t-shirt which was designed by one of our members. Both Tracey Kassin and I have provided our students with information that we have gained from History Connected in regards to memorial designs and interpretations. As we move forward with this process, our students have been given the opportunity to meet with the architects for our new high school and express their ideas for the memorial. In between meetings with the architects, we were fortunate enough to take a field trip to New York City to Ground Zero with our committee to view it first hand. Not only did this trip allow our students to see the location of the horrific event, but it also gave them inspiration on how to design a memorial of their own. A few weeks later our students met with the architects again and proposed memorial ideas which they themselves had created. After lengthy discussion, the committee as a whole agreed upon two designs for our memorial. The architects spoke with the students and explained how they were planning on trying to create one memorial by combining the two that were chosen by the committee. Unfortunately the building of our high school has been placed on hold, and as a result we have not heard back from the architects. This setback has not slowed down our committee of students. During the last week of school, our students held their last meeting of the school year. At this meeting, we had a guest speaker come to speak with our students about creating memorials. The speaker was a local man who worked on the Town of Wilmington’s War Memorial on the town common which commemorates veterans from World War I, World War II, Vietnam, and the Korean War. H explained to the students about the process involved in creating a memorial and also volunteered his help with the process. Our committee also worked on some new fundraising ideas for next year, as the need for more funds is still very important. Our committee was inspired by the History Connected program and we wanted to keep all of those interested up to date with our progress.