Big Lake students learn the meaning of Veterans Day

BIG LAKE — Mat-Su Borough School District schools were closed for a scheduled in-service day on Monday, so students at Big Lake Elementary and elsewhere in the district celebrated Veterans Day on Friday with songs, poems, lessons and light refreshments.

Students in Jousette McKeel’s kindergarten and Connie Service’s third-grade classes invited family, friends and veterans to come to hear them recite a Veterans Day Poem, the “Pledge of Allegiance” and sing the “Star Spangled Banner.”

The kindergarten class focused on the things they were thankful for that they enjoy due to veterans’ service, freedoms such as going to school, singing, voting and traveling.

“Thank you veterans,” the class said in unison, ending its part in the show.

Their teacher, McKeel, served six years in the U.S. Army and received the American Legion’s 2001 Spirit of Service Award.

“It’s kind of a big holiday for me,” McKeel said.

As a veteran and a kindergarten teacher, she said she spends a lot of time talking to her students about what soldiers do, what they look like and why Veterans Day is important.

McKeel said the celebration included a Wall of Honor where students were invited to post photos of the service members in their lives, like moms, dads or grandparents.

Third-grade teacher Connie Service said Veterans Day is a big deal for her family, too.

Her father, grandpa, uncle, grandmother and many more members of her family served in the military.

“I have a military family,” Service said.

She detailed how her father was a helicopter pilot who flew for the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Navy; her maternal grandmother was a nurse in the Army Corps; and her paternal grandfather retired as a vice admiral in the Navy. Although the class had shifted to the cake, cookies and punch part of its program, when the two teachers heard that one of their honored guests was Vietnam veteran Ron Travis of Big Lake, they added one more item to the agenda.

Travis is the man behind the Last Frontier Honor Flight nonprofit that led a recent effort to organize and pay the way for the first group of Alaska veterans to travel to Washington, D.C., last month to see the World War II Memorial and other sites.

“Those guys are the reason we get to do what we do today,” Travis told students of the first class of Honor Flight participants.

He said making the journey with a group of 25 veterans ages 87 to 94 was nerve-wracking. “We only had to call the paramedics twice.”

For most, it was their first time visiting Washington, D.C., Travis said. “They’d been all over the world, but they hadn’t been to D.C.”

Rep. Don Young even dropped by the National Museum of the United States Navy to pay his respects and say hello to his many old friends in the group.

“Leonard Nugent, he’s known Rep. Young for 100 years,” Travis teased in an interview after his classroom presentation.

Total, a group of 61 veterans and chaperones flew from Anchorage to Portland to Washington, D.C., for the four-night, five-day trip.

“They were tough in the day and they are still tough,” Travis said. “It was an amazing trip.”

Fundraising is underway for the next Honor Flight, scheduled in April 2014.

For more information, visit tlfhonorflight.org.