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Sacrifice honored

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Canon-McMillan students Kelsey Murano, left, and Kari Parkhill were among nearly 90 honors students who placed flags on veterans’ graves in Oak Spring Cemetery Saturday.

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Oak Spring Cemetery, Canonsburg

CANONSBURG – A lesson on service and sacrifice took place at Oak Spring Cemetery in Canonsburg Saturday morning when a record number of high school students turned out to place flags on veterans’ graves.

What would normally take cemetery employees or board members a whole day to do was accomplished in about an hour when three times the normal number of students arrived to take part.

The nearly 90 teens are in Scott Drakeley’s freshman history honors class at Canon-McMillan High School.

“The amount of interest this year was quite humbling and overwhelming,” Drakeley said.

Normally, 30 students take part, but Tim Grebeck, a sophomore, spoke to the students about his experience last year, prompting more to volunteer for the task.

The students have taken part in the flag placing for about 5 or 6 years said Gina Nestor, vice-president of the cemetery board.

The board provided each student with a T-shirt and small flag.

The cemetery was founded in 1775 as a church cemetery for the Chartiers meeting house of the Presbyterian Church. When the church relocated, the cemetery was deeded to the borough. Today, the 79-acre cemetery is the final resting place for 18,000 people.

Among the dead are two dozen servicemen from the Revolutionary War and a similar number from the War of 1812. There are about 150 Civil War soldiers buried there, including one man who fought for the Confederacy. Veterans from all the other nation’s wars and conflicts are represented, including one who served in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Nestor provided students a history of Memorial Day, and Drakeley said the meaning of the holiday became very real when one student realized the solider buried at one site had died at the age of 17.

“We talk a lot in the classroom what it means to be an American but I think it’s important for them to see what that’s all about,” Drakeley said.

As a brisk wind blew the flags, Drakeley added “it speaks volumes of the character” of the young people willing to get up early on their day off, especially those students who return each year.

“It gives them time to pay their respects,” he said.

The flags will remain at the graves until after Veteran’s Day, explained cemetery superintendent Sharon Cox.

Prior to the flag placing, students participated in a brief ceremony at the flag plaza, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and then raising a flag for each branch of the service, as well as the American flag and a POW-MIA flag. Those flagpoles recently were donated to the cemetery by Canonsburg American Legion Post 253 and Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 191.

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