There is hope and confidence that the American dream will continue for generations when you see hundreds of kids five to ten years old standing up, clapping, smiling broadly and waving American flags as two dozen or so veterans from all branches of the service came into the gym of the John F. Kennedy School in South Plainfield on Veterans Day.
It’s a tradition that has been going on every Veterans Day for the past 15 years at this school, thanks to an amazing principal, Dr. Kevin Hajduk and a team of dedicated teachers and teachers’ aides.
Dr. Hajduk sets aside Veterans Day every year to be sure everyone of the students in the kindergarten through 4th grade school gets the chance to learn more about the United States and the men and women who serve to keep it free, gets to learn what a real hero is, and gets to brag about friends or members of his own family who serve or have served in the military.
The school sets day long activities to ensure the students know everything about Armistice Day that ended World War I and when and why it was changed from honoring the end of that war to a day recognizing everyone who has served in the military. It’s a day when the students can bring in family members and honor them before the entire school population and even have them come back to their classrooms and talk about their time in the service.
With approximately 300 students in the four grades, there were two dozen relatives, most of them grandfathers of students, representing every branch of the military service except the Space Force, who sat in front of the audience while students conducted a program to honor them, having each be recognized as the anthem of their particular branch of service was played.
Children also stood up to be recognized along with their relatives and to accept the applause of the student body, teachers and other staff members. Military members were then invited back to classrooms to answer questions from the students and tell something of their lives in the military.
It was Athan McNamee, son of Trey and Jamie McNamee, who invited his great aunt, Commander Tracie Smith-Yeoman USN (ret) to not only be honored by the school but also to talk to his first-grade class at Kennedy School. Commander Smith Yeoman served 23 years in the Navy and is currently the chief naval instructor at MAST, the Marine Academy of Science and Technology on Sandy Hook.
As a naval officer, she was a deep-sea diver and served in Hawaii, Kuwait and Cuba among other locations.
In speaking to the students after the ceremony, it was hard to tell whether they were more fascinated by the blue shark she met while scrubbing barnacles off the bottom of a ship or the camels she chased from the firing range in Kuwait when the men and women were practicing with firearms.
