A small part of Jacksonville will be featured at a major dedication tomorrow in Washington D.C.
The Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial will be officially dedicated Thursday, September 17th in a televised ceremony following years of work to make the memorial possible. In the run up to completion and dedication of the memorial, planners decided to invite students from schools around the country named after the 34th U.S. President to contribute to the ceremony.
Beth Brockschmidt, Principal of Eisenhower Elementary School says like the memorial, plans for the contributions from students around the county have been a long time in the making.
“Last January, all the Eisenhower schools in the country were contacted and asked to submit artwork by their students for inclusion in the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial to be highlighted at the dedication ceremony. So I forwarded that request to our art teacher Claudia Pichford, and she took it to our 5th grade classes, and we had three students, Hailey Casey, Braxton Cook and Brendan Hummer, who submitted artwork that was then submitted to that Eisenhower Memorial Commission, and will be included in the dedication ceremony that will be televised Thursday night.
Brockschmidt says although there is not an emphasis on Eisenhower in the curriculum each year, the student’s contributions to the memorial dedication, combined with the 50th anniversary of the Eisenhower Elementary School Building in 2021 means more emphasis will will be placed on leaning about the man the school is named after.
She says it’s evident the three students who submitted artwork for the dedication, had to do a little homework on their own in planning their projects.
“One of the things that all three of the students included in their drawings were quotes by President Eisenhower, so they had to have done a little bit of research with this. The three submissions are different, some of them feature a drawing of the President himself, or other symbolism for the Presidency or the President himself, but all of them include a quote from the President too so they did a little homework with it as well.”
The Eisenhower Memorial is located in a newly created, four-acre public park adjacent to the National Mall and across the street from the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in D.C. The design highlights Eisenhower from his humble childhood in the mid-west, to his role as Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in World War II and his two terms as President.
The dedication will be live streamed tomorrow on Facebook Live. More information about the memorial and the dedication can be found at eisenhowermemorial.gov