Construction at local school uncovers 9/11 memorial messages
ELKHART, Ind. -- In the midst of construction at Concord Ox Bow Elementary School, 24-year-old drawings and images were discovered-- commemorating Sept. 11, 2001.
Shad Hartsough is the principal at Concord Ox Bow Elementary.
"I get a text that said, 'Hey, you're not going to believe this,' and you never know what you're going to find in a construction project. So, what we discovered is we took off some of our marker boards, then we found out that we had some drawings behind three of the rooms," said Hartsough.
The 24-year-old drawings and signatures of previous students were still there, all those years later. Hartsough says they recognized some of the names, and the school posted the discovery on social media.
Amongst those names written on the wall was Katie Helm, who is now a first-grade teacher at Oxbow.
She placed her new signature in the same room, feet from her previous one.
"I was just in my room one day after school, and Mr. Hartsough, our principal, came and was like, 'Here, come here. I gotta show you something.' And I was wondering what it was. I'm like, well, you're taking me back to my old fifth-grade classroom, and lo and behold, there was my name written on the wall," said Helm.
Helm was 10 years old but remembers how she felt back then.
"You know, I remember everybody banding together. And, you know, I think even in the world today, we still need that. We still need to come together as a group. And now it just brings back that sense of community and wishing that even out of a terrible thing, a lot of community came out of that," said Helm.
Rachel Rump, also a previous student, saw the school's post on social media. She explained how it brought back memories.
"It just brought back the feelings earlier. You know, they return every single year, of exactly where I was sitting on that floor in a circle as Miss Stevens, our teacher, told us what was happening in the world," said Rump.
Now, current students are building on this piece of history. The school, now K-4th grade, had its 4th graders sign the walls, next to the ones from students that were done 24 years prior.
"We thought to ourselves, what can we do to kind of build upon this? And so, we're trying to work with our current fourth-grade students to kind of leave their mark on what this meant for them, because that's something that changed our whole society when that event happened. And so, you know, we want to remember it. We didn't want to get rid of it, because it was an important time. And so, we want to preserve it, but then we want to add to it with our current students," said Hartsough.
The principal tells me this will all be covered up again with another marker board, but says down the road, when it's uncovered again, those students can add to it.
The messages will live on, behind the new marker boards. Helm says she's glad they are preserving this.
"I'm glad that the next generation will get to have their name on here as well. And you know, maybe in another 25-30 years, we'll take it down, and maybe some of them will be staff here. So, it's a cool thought," said Helm.