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Veterans Day commemorated

Manawa interviews veterans,  posts school program online

By Greg Seubert


COVID-19 put a damper on Veterans Day programs throughout the country earlier this month.

That wasn’t the case in the Manawa School District, however.

A virtual Veterans Day program can be viewed on the district’s YouTube page.

Library media specialist Jennifer Krueger and band director Austin Rohan helped create the 53-minute program, which included student and staff interviews with local veterans and musical performances.

A link to the program can be found on the district’s website – www.manawaschools.org – and Facebook page.

“We knew that the traditional Veterans Day ceremony was something that we didn’t want a year to go by,” Little Wolf High School Principal Dan Wolfgram told the Manawa School Board Nov. 16. “We hold this ceremony in very high regard. I implored with my staff to see that they could do and they rose to the challenge.”

Staff efforts

Krueger helped make the project a reality, he said.

“She not only created the graphics for the posters that she does every year, she also reached out to veterans in the community to see if they might be interested in doing an interview project with some of our students,” Wolfgram said. “The amount of time that she took in editing the final project was countless number of hours.”

Rohan worked with nearly 70 band and choir students in grades 7-12 for a performance of “America the Beautiful.”

“We installed a program called Soundtrap,” Rohan said. “An MP3 is a digital file of a song. I upload an MP3 to an assignment on Soundtrap. From there, I disperse it to all my students. We rehearse every day in class. Students at home would follow along with PDFs of their music and students in-person were performing with their bell covers and masks on.

“We went through the process to learn the music,” he said. “When the kids were at home for the two-week portion, their assignment was to use the Soundtrap program to create a new track. They would use the microphone on their laptops and they would put earbuds in to listen to the MP3, which I uploaded. They would play along with their recording. I would hear it here, but the microphone would only pick up their instrument.”

Rohan then spent several hours editing the 2 1/2-minute long musical performance, which can be found about 43 minutes into the program.

“The kids were amazing,” Krueger said. “A lot of the sixth-graders did an awesome job of interviewing veterans. We had two community members come in and I interviewed them. I was so pleased that we could pull this all together and be able to do something virtually since we couldn’t get together in person.”

“The collaboration that my staff put together to make this happen for the community was unbelievable,” Wolfgram said. “You need to watch this. It was very touching.”

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