Although there is a Holocaust Remembrance Day every year, senior project coordinator Louise Geczy has changed up this year’s schedule.

The main change Gezcy has made for the Remembrance Day on Tuesday, Feb. 28, is the addition of a student-run reader’s theater presentation at the end of the day.

“Seniors Adam Kuester, Scott Novak, Grace Kim, and Nick Henninger are doing a reader’s theater presentation, a tribute to the survivors. We’ll invite [the guest speakers] back into the auditorium to see the last part of the presentation. What the four seniors have done is pulled poetry and prose written by people who were in the Holocaust, and they’re going to get up and perform some of the pieces,” Geczy said.

After the performances, two senior AP English classes will lead the rest of the class in the Jewish prayer “We Remember Them.”

Relatively new to the Holocaust Remembrance Day is a display of student responses to the required senior reading, “Night,” by Elie Wiesel. English teachers required that students write responses to the Holocaust and their reading.  This is the second year that student writing about the Holocaust will be displayed, according to Geczy.

English teacher Deborah Stathes’s classes had to research people from the Holocaust and make a diary that the person might’ve written. Stathes’s classes are also making a memory quilt, which is new this year. Her students were required to create squares with quotations on them related to their reading while Stathes created the backing for the quilt.

Geczy attributes the changes to this year’s program to her desire to keep students engaged. “I’m always looking for ways to connect with students and connect a piece of history that I think has fairly limitless life lessons connected to it. I think it’s a whole lot better when students hear from each other instead of having teachers stand up in the front of the room and telling them,” Geczy said.

 Emily Clarke is a Managing Editor for The Patriot and jcpatriot.com.