By Ashley Handlan
Special to the Voice

Sometimes it's hard to imagine in this beautiful coastal city that a war is raging halfway across the world, but occasionally a reminder comes from an unexpected source.

Students in San Marcos High School's PALMS Academy discovered their awareness and looked for an effective way to spread it to others. With the help of a dedicated teacher, the teenagers created their own Iraq War Memorial to alert fellow students, staff and visitors to the reality of this distant conflict.

As part of a yearlong undertaking for their Social Dialogues class, PALMS Academy students unveiled the war memorial on May 10 at the Santa Barbara School Districts' board meeting. The project continues to be on display every Wednesday and Friday from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., hanging from the walls of San Marcos High School's outdoor amphitheater. It will also be exhibited at the Veterans Memorial Building over the Memorial Day weekend. The project honors more than one thousand U.S. soldiers who have died in action, displaying each soldier's picture, name, age, hometown, and date of death.

London-born Phillip Hughes, teacher of the Academy's Social Dialogues class and muse to the students' creative endeavors, described the purpose of the class and how the students came to decide upon their message of awareness: "The Social Dialogues class...has two parts to it. The first part is to get the students to think about social issues that they're interested in, and the second part is to have them try and find out how to be active around the social issues they're interested in."

Hughes remembered looking with the students at a local newspaper for current issues, and how the front-page story detailed the number of U.S. casualties in Iraq. Hughes said, "We talked about how much awareness there was on the San Marcos campus about the number of people who have given their lives in this conflict, and the feeling among the students was that the students really weren't aware of what was going on."

Before the project was to unfold, however, the students needed funding. They decided to obtain sponsorship from The Fund for Santa Barbara. To do so, the students learned how to write and produce a successful grant proposal and acquired $1,572 for the memorial's construction.

The project's design evolved through a process of trial and error. The students first decided to represent each deceased soldier on a six-by-six-inch laminated card and place each card on one of the square bricks that make up the school's amphitheater walls. After doing a bit of research, class members found that there were not enough bricks to hold cards for every soldier who has died in combat to date. Hughes recalled going "back to the drawing board," after which one of the students suggested hanging twelve eight-by-four-foot wooden panels on the walls, each panel containing a grid pattern for the cards. Regarding the inclusion of each soldier's picture, Hughes said, "Just seeing a list of names doesn't really do much, but when you can see a picture of the soldier...it gives you much more of an immediate effect, especially when so many of them are so young."

The Social Dialogues students have donated more than their share of time and energy to this ongoing project. Once the class had reached a stage where they had the design, the funding, and the materials, the semester was coming to a close. The students then had to make the commitment to work on the project after the class was over. Sophomore Ben Warren, 16, who has been part of PALMS for two years, described his personal donation to the project, including making cards, organizing lists of the soldiers according to the month they died, cutting laminations to fit the cards, and laminating new cards as more soldiers die overseas. Freshman Alex Sheffield recalled friends who were not in the class and other San Marcos students pitching in on the project, as well.

"I don't do very well in normal classes and I like to pick how I learn, and it seemed that this would be better and easier," replied Sheffield, when he was asked why he decided to join the PALMS program, He first heard about it from a friend. PALMS, or Personalized Alternative Learning by Motivated Students, has been at San Marcos for three years. It develops education agendas specific to each student, meeting the teenager's needs and encouraging learning through real-world interaction and community involvement.

The future of the students' Iraq War Memorial is unclear, especially considering this will most likely be the PALMS program's last year of existence, because of loss of funding. "In some ways, I guess this is the last big hurrah for the program," said Hughes. Hopefully the project will be handed over to a school club and will continue to be maintained. But, as Hughes remarked, "I think in some ways the best case scenario obviously is that there's no need for this memorial anymore...and we weren't having to make students aware of the sacrifices being made."

PHOTO BY MARCY SUTTON/BROOKS INSTITUTE