Beth-Center students honor veterans’ graves
Scott Beveridge/Observer-Reporter
Jaslyn Debnar, a sixth-grader at Bethlehem-Center Middle School, places a pine blanket on the grave of a veteran Thursday in Buckingham Cemetery.
Scott Beveridge/Observer-Reporter
Christpher Erickson, a sixth-grader at Bethlehem-Center Middle School, prepares to place a wreath on the grave of a veteran Thursday in Buckingham Cemetery.
FREDERICKTOWN – Reading from textbooks doesn’t always tell the whole story to young students who are learning about war veterans, a local schoolteacher said.
“They need real-life experiences,” said Mike Ozohonish, a sixth-grade social studies teacher at Bethlehem-Center Middle School.
“They need to understand the sacrifices these people made,” Ozohonish said Thursday when he and a group of students placed live pine decorations on the graves of veterans at Buckingham Cemetery in Deemston.
He assigns his students every year to donate some time to veterans causes.
This is the first year they were visiting this well-kept small cemetery as part of Wreaths Across America, when groups honor veterans every December through wreath-laying ceremonies.
“It’s a really great project,” said sixth-grader Jaslyn Debnar, 11, after she placed a pine grave blanket on a grave.
Wreaths Across America will be at the National Cemetery of the Alleghenies in Cecil Township, doing the same thing at noon Saturday.
Ozohonish said he got the idea to get his students involved at Buckingham Cemetery because his wife’s grandparents, Donald and Betty Arnold, are buried there.
He said his students sold T-shirts to help fund the $600 project. He found the pine branches, and his family created the wreaths and blankets, which were then decorated by his students.
Plans call for the students to restore some of the older gravestones at the cemetery.
The gated cemetery along Buckingham Road began as a small family plot of graves on a farm of the same name, and it eventually was abandoned, said Brenda Bennett, president of the cemetery association.
A group attending a family reunion in the 1950s decided to resurrect the burial grounds, which has about 600 undeveloped plots, she said.
She said the association was honored to see local students take an interest in the cemetery, which holds the graves of about 40 veterans, some of whom served in the Civil War.
“It touches our hearts,” Bennett said. “One, because the Beth-Center students are doing something positive, and, two, because they are honoring veterans.”