Submitted by Bonnie Burks Gray
Nearly 200 Shelby County High history students are part of an exciting discovery mission as they make history themselves. Junior Class History Teachers, Katie Johnson and Jeffrey Bracken, are introducing their students to an opportunity to collaborate with volunteers from Friends of Grove Hill (FGH) and Calvary cemeteries, and the Shelby County Historical Society on what is believed to be a never-done-before project, certainly not one of this magnitude.
Reportedly, some students initially responded to the idea of working in cemeteries with people who liked to do that, saying, “Really? EEK! EW! BOO! EH? ACK! HMM.”
But on April 15th, when the first field day to the two cemeteries was closing and students were loading the four buses to return to the county high school, volunteers heard: “Thank You! See you next time! Oh, no, time to go? When do we get to come back? I had a great time. This was great!”
What were the 30 or so volunteers saying after an exhausting four hours with over 140 students in 80+ degrees? “ My students were just precious. My team was so engaged, not one complaint. They asked great questions! I want to please be part of this next field day. Best thing I’ve been part of in ages.”
The endeavor over 250, students, teachers, and volunteers are part, of is a nationwide program, called Project Based Learning, PBL. The incentive is to help students use hands-on creative skills to solve problems. Friends of Grove Hill was honored when Kelly McNew, Shelby County Public Schools’ Work Based Learning Liaison, introduced FGH’s goals to preserve not only the monuments in the cemetery but the history of the people the stones memorialized to Johnson and Bracken as they considered what PBL to offer their students. The teachers saw the goals of FGH as a great learning opportunity for their students. To strengthen the initiative, FGH asked Calvary’s board members and friends and the historical society to join in the project.
Project coordinators, Carol Franks, Martha Moffett and Bonnie Burks Gray naively thought the teachers might be responsible for about 50 students. On learning the quadrupled number, the trio knew the first goal was to find mentors, adult historians, and retired teachers, all folks who loved young people. Then, ask the mentors to adopt a team of six to eight students to help them discover a Grove Hill or Calvary resident. The partnership of the students and the three volunteer groups looked at the PBL as a challenge having problems, goals, and solutions.
The Challenge: the local cemeteries had individuals, they called “residents,” who were historically significant. Residents whose contributions were so valuable, their stories were worthy of knowing and telling.
Problem: The plots and monuments in Grove Hill and Calvary (or any cemetery), are not owned by the cemetery companies. Their maintenance and preservation are the responsibilities of the residents’ descendants. Sometimes there are no descendants who know that or are concerned about the condition of their ancestors’ resting grounds or monuments. Some residents lived so long ago they have no descendants left to care.
Students were invited to adopt one of the selected residents from either Calvary or Grove Hill. They would learn how to read cemetery maps to discover where their residents’ monuments were located, mark the lot with a discovery flag and determine the condition of the monument.
The teams’ goals: assess the condition of their residents’ monuments, clean/preserve them and/or neighboring monuments, research their residents’ stories, write their biographies, and create webpages that tell the residents’ stories for a worldwide audience.
How? By partnering with the Welding and Machine Tool Pathway Students in Shelby County Area Technology Center to create metal plaques on rods to hold QR Codes. Visitors wandering through the cemeteries who discover one of the plaques beside a monument and scan the QR Code will be whisked to https://www.grovehillcemetery.org/biographies. This portal will take readers to a directory of the adopted residents who were researched and written about by Shelby County High’s juniors. The completed webpage will credit the students who created it.
The students’ PBL schedule depends on the weather but includes two more events in Calvary and Grove Hill. A day of monument preservation will also feature reenactments or storytelling about some of the residents. The final event is an evening celebration of the project’s completion, which students are planning for early May. Then students will celebrate the completion of their project by inviting family, friends and the community to the official launch of their webpages as the QR Codes go live. Details will be announced in the Sentinel-News, on Grove Hill’s website, and the high school’s website.
Editor’s Note: Bonnie Burks Gray is a member of the boards for Grove Hill Cemetery and the Shelby County Historical Society and co-chair of Friends of Grove Hill.
* Current slang for the 20th Century slang word “cool”
