Memorial includes Moses Lake teacher
Tulips are placed at the memorial for those affected by the 1996 Frontier Junior High School shooting in Moses Lake this week. A special memorial for teachers will include Frontier’s algebra teacher, Leona Caires, one of the three shooting victims.
EMPORIA, KANSAS — A Moses Lake teacher will be among the 112 people remembered on a memorial to teachers, administrators and other school personnel killed while working at school or with students. The memorial, at the National Teachers Hall of Fame at Emporia State University, will be dedicated June 12.
Leona Caires was one of three victims at what was then Frontier Junior High, when a student opened fire in a classroom in February 1996. She was an algebra teacher.
The memorial also will include the name of Benton City teacher Bob Mars, stabbed by a student in 2004.
The idea for a memorial originated in late 2012, after teachers and administrators were among the victims at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Education professionals wanted to do something to remember them, Executive Director Carol Strickland said.
One of the ideas was a memorial to them, and other teachers, principals, bus drivers, classroom aides, anybody at school who died while "carrying out their duties for the school in some way," Strickland said.
"We started doing the research and it (school personnel who had died) was bigger than we thought," she said.
The researchers went all the way back to the country's founding, and beyond - the first name is that of a teacher killed with his students in an attack in 1764. The people remembered include three teachers killed on Sept. 11, 2001, a bus driver who died while trying to protect students on his bus from a kidnapping, and a teacher who fell off a school roof while installing equipment for science class.
The memorial is two open books displaying the names and is carved from black granite.