BONNYVILLE – A group of Grade 12 students from École Notre Dame High School will once again take part in the No Stone Left Alone project.
The project, started by an Edmonton family in 2011, has spread across Canada with a mission to educate students while honouring and remembering Canada’s veterans.
This will be the fifth year the high school will take part in the No Stone Left Alone project, says Siobhan Squires, a Notre Dame teacher and organizer for the event.
On Nov. 10, Notre Dame students will visit cemeteries to lay poppies on the graves marked with a military stone prior to taking part in the Remembrance Day ceremony at St. Louis Parish.
If time permits, students will also be stopping at the ceremonial Teepee display erected next to the Bonnyville Friendship Centre that marked Indigenous Veterans Day, which took place on Nov. 8.
The program was brought to the school’s attention by the family of a student whose grandparents were veterans.
“They had heard about this program and thought it would be a really cool way to engage our students in honouring veterans,” explains Squires. “We looked into it, took the information and started to run with it.”
For Squires, who also had grandparents serve in the World Wars, giving students the opportunity to visit the graves of fallen veterans and take part in a ceremony to remember their sacrifices helps to provide a deeper meaning to in-class lessons.
“Having taught some of the literature around it, it's really important for students to recognize the sacrifice that was made for us, for our things that we enjoy so much, like freedom, like peace,” she says. “That by taking the time to be reflective and remember it, that they can hopefully apply some of these ideas into their own life. How to choose to be peaceful instead of create conflict, or how to be selfless and helping others around them and protect others when they need it.”
Every year Squires says she wonders how students will respond to the activity, but every year “they recognize that this is something that is important and they come back the being very reflective and thoughtful.”
By the time the Grade 12 students arrive to the Remembrance Day ceremony, Squires finds that students are in the right mindset to be student leaders at the church and are more willing to share thoughts and stories about their own families' experiences relating to global wars.
With fewer soldiers left to tell their own stories of World War I and II, as well as the Korean War, Squires says, “I feel like the legacy that they have left will continue to live on... We're not going to let it fade away with their passing, but we're going to keep talking about it. We're going to keep their memory alive and make sure that this is something that the students continue to engage in.”
