Dawson-Bryant students reflect on 9/11 projects

Published 12:00 am Sunday, September 18, 2011

COAL GROVE — For the 10th anniversary of 9/11, some Dawson-Bryant High School seniors were able to remember that day in a unique way.

Students in Monica Mahlmeister’s social studies class were put up to the task of making physical representations of the tragedy and showing the impact of the nearly 3,000 lives lost.

Matt Jenkins worked with classmate James Suttles to produce a video, interviewing both students and teachers. Jenkins said they talked to about 20 people about where they were and who they were with on 9/11, as well as their initial thoughts and how they felt 10 years later.

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“Some people were really quiet,” Jenkins said, “and some people got teary-eyed.”

Lacee Sammet and Brandon Moore worked as a team to create a representation of each life lost in the attacks, which turned out to be a huge undertaking, the two said.

“We got the idea from the Paper Clips Project,” Moore said, which was a monument created to represent each life lost in the Holocaust using paperclips.

Instead of paperclips, the students cut out red, white and blue paper hearts and hand-wrote the names of the victims, all 2,977 of them.

The red hearts represented the people that died in the World Trade Center towers and the planes that hit them. The white hearts represented the lives lost at the Pentagon and the blue hearts those that died in the plane crash in Pennsylvania. The hearts were placed in the school’s multi-purpose room.

“We covered the doors with black paper and then covered them with the hearts,” Sammet said. “and put the hearts on the walls.”

Sammet and Moore said it took two weeks to cut out all the hearts, and they got some help from other classes so they could finish on time.

Even though the seniors were in the second grade 10 years ago, they all said they still remember that day and projects like the ones they completed are important so younger generations will understand the tragedy.

Moore, who admitted the project sounded easy at first, said it was a lot of work, but made him realize the gravity of that day.

“I definitely know how many 3,000 people are,” he said.