Revere High School (RHS) held its annual Veterans Day Assembly and Breakfast, which featured speakers, elementary students performing for the veterans, and any veterans in the area were welcome.

The day began at 9 o’clock with the student council serving breakfast to local veterans. At 10 o’clock the assembly started where all the students were present. After a few words from the RHS principal Doug Faris the assembly kicked off by welcoming all the veterans into the main gym, and the students and staff flooded the room with applause, followed shortly by the speaker. This year’s speaker was Colonel Shannon Juby, mother of senior Donovan Juby. Faris opened the ceremony, but social studies teacher Jeff Fry organized the event.

“My role is a general oversight to make sure that we’re on pace with everything, and that there’s a plan. Mr. Fry came to me at the beginning of the year, and he said, ‘Hey, for a guest speaker, we had talked to Colonel Juby at the end of last year, at the end of the ceremony, [and] she said she would be willing to do it.’ This was back in the second week of school, so we called Colonel Juby together and said, ‘Hey, we would really like you to be our guest speaker,’ and she [accepted]. 

Helping secure and make those connections, I kind of act as the master of ceremonies a little bit even though so much of it is put on by our students,” Faris said.

Fry chairs the social studies department, which consists of Phil Heyn, Sandor Jakab, Pete Rahas, Rachel Walgate, Eric Browne, Robert Nickol and Jason Milczewski. The group handles all the moving parts and makes the event possible. While securing a speaker is seemingly the most important aspect of the program, there are several other working parts that enhance the ability to obtain a speaker. The social studies department works together to create a welcoming environment that consists of patriotic decorations that create a buzzing atmosphere among the veterans.

“Mr. Milczewski handles the music as the veterans are coming in. . . . Mrs. Walgate does a lot of the coordinating with our special needs students, [and] . . . they do some of the artwork and things like that that go up in the cafeteria. . . . She also does some coordinating with the elementary school because we have first graders come to our school when they sing songs and they read poems to the veterans, which is really amazing and really cute. . . . 

There are probably two-hundred kids who were here, and it’s pretty cool. . . . Mr. Nickol and Mr. Rahas take care of putting the flags out. . . . Mrs. Fagnilli does the program for us, and Mr. Browne organizes the binder that everybody uses. . . . There are so many different people who do so many things which makes [Veterans Day] possible,” Fry said.

After all the moving parts are in place, the next step in making an event like the Veterans Day assembly work is to invite people from the community who serve. Administrative Assistant Debbie Zendlo handles reaching out to the community members who served and inviting them to RHS.

“I get all the information from the social studies and English departments and put it in a flyer with a link so that the veterans have an easy ability to sign up. I put that out in a couple of the [local] publications, the Bath Country Journal and the Richfield Times. . . . I also took lists [of attendants] from the past four years; I compiled those together, and I sent out an email to all those people. I also called a few local retirement communities and retirement home facilities. I got a couple of those to respond [to the email]. 

I have a whole bus-load of retirement and independent living people coming,” Zendlo said.

The Senior Class President Ria Mahapatra and Class Council President Isabelle Aiken led the pledge of allegiance, followed by Choir Director Sierra Pabon leading both Symphonic Choir and Chorale in the national anthem. Earlier this year, Faris reached out to Pabon, asking her to have the choir do a second piece. Pabon decided to let the school’s A Capella group get involved in the assembly. Reverse A Cappella decided to sing the song Rise, originally sung by Katy Perry. This song carries the theme of a hero facing challenges and persevering in the end.

Senior Nicky Ghiorghie and sophomores Katie Parsons and Myles Kelly gave a speech that has been a part of several Veterans Day assembly.

“[The tradition is] about this dining room table that’s set for prisoners of war and those missing in action, and everything on the table is symbolic of something related to that,” Ghiorghie said.

The three students alternated every few lines when giving the Prisoner of War (POW) and Missing in Action (MIA) speech; they would switch off whenever they talked about a new symbol shown on the table. And at the end of every line, they would say the word ‘remember.’

This year, the orchestra got involved, and they played a melody during this speech.

“We met with the orchestra director and orchestra twice, one on Friday [the seventh] and one on Monday [the tenth], and we just practiced our speech, [and] went over it with the music playing behind us,” Kelly said.

On top of the vocal performances, the band played Salute to America’s Finest, a medley of the service songs for each branch of the military. The orchestra played a rendition of America the Beautiful and a backtrack for the POW/MIA speech. Orchestra Director Joshua Bowman spoke about the preparation aspect of the orchestra’s performance.

“The first thing is choosing the right music and making sure that we’re not doubling up on the songs and working with the other [musical] groups and making sure we don’t [perform] Star Spangled Banner fifteen times throughout the whole [assembly],” Bowman said.

The selection process continued as Bowman assessed the ability of the orchestra. This year, the group played a much more complex version of America the Beautiful than they have in previous years. The group needed to find a balance between the excitement of a new, harder piece of music and the professionalism that is required for an event like this.

“It’s exciting to teach a harder version of the music. It goes with how you look at [the event]; if we’re looking at it as a way to honor [the veterans], then we can go at it with excitement. I know when we’re talking about veterans, we talk about people that have come home, but then there’s also those that haven haven’t come home. Having a couple of veterans in my family, I’m thinking about them as we’re performing, just a way of honoring them,” Bowman said.

RHS has hosted these Veterans Day traditions for over twenty years, and it is an event that the local community continues to attend and appreciate.

For more information on the history of the Veterans Day event and program at Revere, click HERE.