Many people dream of having a house with a white picket fence.
Mike Garbowski, a member of the Yonkers Federation of Teachers, decided to bring that dream into school. He wanted students in his class to personalize a section of an old picket fence. So, the 33-year-old elementary teacher pulled off the pickets, sanded each one, and then brushed a coat of white paint over each board. His idea was to put a picket on each student’s desk, and have him/her paint their name on it. Then, he would assemble a picket fence outside the classroom to signify the feeling of home. Hopefully, the fourth graders he teaches would sense the feeling of ‘family’ as they walked down the hall toward their class.
But then a shooter blasted his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., where Garbowski lives with his wife and three children. Twenty-six people were gunned down at the school in December, including 20 children, teachers, a principal, a teacher’s aide, a speech therapist, and a school psychologist. The adults who were killed tried to save the children in their care. The little children who died were just six and seven years old; some of them having just lost their front baby teeth, all of them blooming with personality.
“Some of these teachers stood in front of door in a room filled with children that weren’t their own, knowing they might die,” said Garbowski, the father of one-year-old twin boys and a pre-kindergarten daughter. “I don’t think everybody would be able to do something like that. Some had families of their own.”
He and his wife Tracy, like so many others wrestling with anguish, wanted to do something to honor those that died.
“She thought of the class project I was planning, and came up with using that same idea to erect a memorial for the Sandy Hook school family,” Garbowski said. “ So, together, we created something that we thought represented the Sandy Hook School family; something that people could visit to pay their respects; something we hoped would help with the healing process in town.”
Solemnly, he painted each of the victims’ names, one to a picket: Charlotte, Daniel, Ana, Olivia, Josephine, Dylan, Madeline, Catherine, Chase, Jesse, James, Grace, Emilie, Jack, Noah, Caroline, Jessica, Avielle, Benjamin, Allison, Rachel, Dawn, Mary, Lauren, Annemarie and Victoria.
It is not hard to picture their ponytails and smiles.
The white picket fence was erected outside the firehouse in Newtown, where the students of Sandy Hook were taken after the massacre. The firehouse is close to the school, and was a designated safe place. It was there where the elementary students waited for their parents to pick them up; and it was there that some parents found out their children were not coming home.
“My wife says I never finish anything around the house, but I spent 4 or 5 days making sure it was complete. I didn’t stop until it was done,” Garbowksi said.
“Living here in Newtown, being a teacher and having one of my three children attending another elementary school in town made me think about what happened from so many different point of views. However, any way you look at it, it's just the most awful thing I have ever seen. As a parent, I can't imagine how it must feel; as a teacher, I would like to think I would have the courage to do what those heroes did,” Garbowksi said.
“You hope your child’s teacher loves their students as much as those teachers did.”
Come September, Garbowski plans on bringing his original picket fence project to school, so students can feel a sense of home as they walk toward the front door of fourth grade.
- Liza Frenette
(Mike Garbowski is a member of the Yonkers Federation of Teachers)