Alicia Johnson, 14, admits her memories of Sept. 11, 2001, aren't as clear as those of the older teens and adults she knows. "It's kind of fuzzy, since it was in second grade," she said. Nevertheless, she and about 300 other students her age spent half a day in community service projects on Friday in observance of Bloomington Oak Grove Middle School's sixth-annual Tom Burnett Jr. Day of Service.
Burnett, a Bloomington native and Jefferson High graduate, was among the passengers who battled the terrorists on board United Airlines Flight 93, thwarting the hijackers' plans to crash the jetliner into the White House or U.S. Capitol. Instead, it went down in a rural Pennsylvania field.
The eighth-graders washed windows, played shuffleboard with senior citizens, sorted used goods and performed other tasks at six nonprofit sites around the area as a follow-up to lessons inspired by the heroics of the Bloomington native and others on board Flight 93.
Burnett's niece, former Bloomington teacher Kathleen West, and Oak Grove's dean of students, Renee Sbrocco, introduced the initiative six years ago, in the months after the terrorist attacks. Since then, Oak Grove eighth-graders have studied citizenship and learned about other inspirational people such as Anne Frank and Martin Luther King Jr. as part of the service program.
Johnson and 13-year-olds Jackie Asomani and Cynthia Limsuwan discussed Burnett and others whose lives they had studied as they washed windows at the Good Samaritan senior residential facility in Inver Grove Heights.
"When [Anne Frank] was trapped in an attic she tried to be happy despite her worries," Limsuwan said. Asomani agreed that Frank's heroism was remarkable.
After cleaning windows and furniture and meeting residents of the center, the trio and their classmates boarded school buses and returned to Oak Grove for a program in memory of Burnett.
Burnett's parents, Tom and Bev Burnett of Northfield, attended the celebration. They sat in the front row of the auditorium as Oak Grove students and teachers discussed their citizenship lessons and recounted their volunteer projects.
