VETERANS
JROTC and NAHS build float to honor veteransBY MCKENNA NELSON ON NOVEMBER 15, 2013
JROTC and National Art Honor Society came together to honor veterans by building a float for the Veteran’s Day Parade on Nov. 11.
“Major Davis and Sergeant Overby announced at our staff meeting that they would like for some clubs to help build a float for the Veteran’s Day Parade,” NAHS advisor Randall Leach said. “We said we would definitely like to help; anything we can do for our veterans we would absolutely want to do.” Major Davis and Sergeant Overby decided to plan a parade for Veteran’s Day since Greenville does not hold one. “All of our classes were involved in planning and organizing the float,” Davis said. “We made it a big part of their grade so they contributed a lot to it.” Members of NAHS and members of JROTC started planning and building the float the week before homecoming. Senior Diane Yanes is involved with both, and she has been involved in the process of planning the parade and the float from the beginning. “I, along with other cadets in Advanced Leadership, have been planning the Veteran’s Day Parade,” Yanes said. “[The float] was our project at the beginning, and we passed it along to National Art Honor Society so they could help us out with it.” Yanes said they wanted to make their float stand out in the crowd, so they came up with innovative ideas to catch people’s attention. Sculptures were built to resemble memorials of veterans, such as those in Hiroshima. Junior Austin Lantz was a model for the sculptures, so he had to stand still while other students used tape to create the shape of his body. “Along with being a model for the sculptures, I also painted a dog tag that represents the Navy,” Lantz said. Yanes said one of her favorite parts was coming up with the ideas to represent the four branches of the armed forces. “We wanted to come up with something more creative than just red, white and blue to represent the four branches of the military,” Yanes said. “We decided to make a large dog tag for each and paint them to represent the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force.” Another issue was getting students to work out their schedules so they could work on the float at the same time. “As with any project, scheduling has been an issue,” Leach said. “Every student has a different schedule, and it is hard to take all of them into consideration with the planning.” Davis wanted to get the Marine Core Band involved, but he said that was a difficult task. “I had to talk with them for twenty minutes to convince them to drive two hours for our parade,” Davis said, “but I was finally able to convince them to come and play.” Despite the challenges, Lantz, Yanes and Leach said they all would like to do it again. “It makes it worth our time and effort that it is a tribute to the veterans who put their time in for something bigger than a parade,” Leach said. Davis said he plans to continue organizing the parade next year since it turned out so well this year. “It was great to have so many groups from Rose involved in the parade this year,” Davis said. “We hope to get more involvement from Rose next year so it can be a Rose Veteran’s day parade.” HTML Comment Box is loading comments...
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