Four Bay Middle School students will lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery Friday. (Photo credit: Arlington National Cemetery)

Students to honor Unknowns
By Jeff Gallatin
Bay Village
Published May 31, 2006

A group of Bay Village students and teachers are making a special trip to honor a noted American at the end of his journey.

Bay Middle School students Kelly Mann, Laura Megyesi, Erica Fanter and Erin Stevens are going with social studies teacher Scott Hack to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery Friday. The ceremony the quartet will be participating in is part of the annual eighth grade trip to Washington, D.C., for students at the school. The four were selected because their essays were picked from a group of 20 written by students hoping to be selected for the honor.

Hack, who will be making his sixth trip to Washington with the eighth-graders, said the trip to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier came about through two different areas.

“We have a video of Arlington which we’ve shown to the students and gotten a good response to it,” Hack said. “There was some interest in the subject by students after seeing it.”

In addition, one student has a relative who works at Arlington. After determining that there was interest among the students about doing something at the Tomb, school officials contacted their Arlington counterparts to see what would be involved.

“It’s a very precise ceremony,” Hack said.

“I’m nervous and scared to be a part of it because you have to dress and act a certain way,” Mann said “I want to make sure we do it right.”

Hack said after school officials got the approval from Arlington, they decided on an essay contest to pick the four student participants.

“We made all the essays anonymous by having one teacher assign them numbers and then we had another group of teachers judge them to pick the winners,” Hack said.

Hack said he and fellow judges Matt Kralik and Kristen Miller had a tough job.

“We just began narrowing them down by a few each time we reviewed them until we settled on the final four,” Hack said. “They did a good job with them. The essays discussed how important it is to honor all the war veterans who’ve sacrificed for us.”

He said he’s looking forward to the trip.

“I’m excited like they are that they will be able to do something like this,” Hack said.

All the students said they intended to honor veterans, with one, Fanter, having an interesting twist on it.

“I wanted to honor both my grandfathers for having served their countries,” Fanter said. “We’ve thought it’s possible they could have had to fight against each other since one was an American soldier and the other was a German officer.”

She said her German grandfather and his family fled to the United States because he was one of the officers who had opposed Hitler.

Stevens, who has been to Washington and the Arlington National Cemetery before with her parents, said she is looking forward to taking the wreath to the tomb.

“Arlington is a quiet, beautiful place,” Stevens said. “I would expect to be very solemn because of the ceremony.”

Even though she has not had any immediate relatives serve in the military, Megyesi said she is still happy and proud to put the wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

“It’s an honor we were selected,” she said. “This is the type of thing you tell your children and grandchildren about.”