Blair Public School students and teacher speak for forgotten veterans

It’s remarkable how one tiny public school can change history.

Walking through the halls of Blair Public School, with its small building and classroom sized library, you wouldn’t think much of it. Catering to grades Pre-K through 12, it’s what to expect from a small town north of Altus.

But for high school English and Humanities teacher Heather McCormick and her handful of after-school students grades 6-12, they are part of something big.

BPS and McCormick were chosen by National History Day to participate in their Silent Heroes program, Untold Stories from the Korean War, sponsored by the Veterans Legacy Program at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. National History Day is a nonprofit education organization seeking to improve the teaching and learning of history, according to its website.

Forty-eight teachers were chosen from 35 states to partner with almost 600 students to research the lives of nearly 100 veterans who’ve served in the U.S. military during the Korean War, according to a press release. Out of the entire state of Oklahoma, BPS was the only school chosen for the program.

Until January 2025, teachers and students meet monthly with historian Christopher Hammer, Ph.D. of George Mason University to study the Korean War and learn more about the experiences of underrepresented vets, the release said. Guided by eight research mentors, participants will use NHD-created materials to leverage databases such as Ancestry Classroom, Fold3 and Newspapers.com to research the lives and service of their selected vets.

After using other research methods such as local libraries, historical societies, and even official military personnel files, teams will synthesize the information to tell the story of their veteran’s life and service with a profile published on the Veterans Legacy Memorial and NHD’s Silent Heroes website, the release said. After their extensive research, they will visit their local national cemetery in Spring 2025 to honor the vets and read eulogies at their graves.

McCormick’s students broke into two teams to conduct research for two vets: U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Sir Mack H. Allen Jr. and U.S. Air Force Technical Sergeant Roosevelt Claiborne “R.C.” Peterson.

“They have done a lot of the research on family members, who their siblings were who their children and grandchildren are,” McCormick said.

Sarah Ledesma, a senior, Sydney Donner, 8th grade, Brooklynn Forster, 7th grade and Hayden Donner, 6th grade are covering Allen Jr, while Kiera, a junior, Riley, a freshman and Bailey Beard, 6th grade are covering Peterson.

Even though they were nervous, both groups mentioned something interesting about the vets.

“On the enlistment, he listed his birthday wrong, so he could enlist,” the Allen Jr. team and McCormick said. “The day he enlisted is also the same day that he put on his (date of birth). That way he could say it was his 18th birthday.”

Allen Jr. was a member of a combat team called “The Rangers,” the Allen Jr. team said.

“They parachuted behind enemy lines to wreak havoc and destruction,” they said.

Peterson’s life was also fruitful.

“We have a newspaper article where he was over $10,000 in debt with his first wife,” Peterson’s team said. “It looks like a mortgage, not 1,000 percent on that. We think maybe they divorced in 1976 because of that, but we’re not so sure about that. He did serve as a technical sergeant in Korea and Vietnam.”

Even though Allen Jr. and Peterson served in the Korean War, Allen Jr. came in at the end of World War Two.

“He’s considered WWII Korea and Peterson is considered Korea Vietnam,” McCormick said.

One of McCormick’s hopes is that other teachers can take this project and bring it into their classrooms to help their students.

“There’s only four veterans from the state of Oklahoma that have been highlighted through this program,” McCormick said. “(Awareness would) not only highlight the program, but help us be able to get connected with families to finish out their stories as well.”

One obstacle they’ve stumbled upon is finding families to reach out to for more information. Both teams think it important for the vets’ stories to be told. They’re learning research skills, how to check sources, critical thinking and oral history techniques. They hope to reach out to families to get more information on them, before they became soldiers, for instance.

“We get a lot of that from the obituaries and we kind of hit a dead end with that,” McCormick said. “They’ve come to me as the adult and we’ve used Facebook to try to reach out to family members.”

McCormick had a chance encounter with a mutual friend of Peterson’s grandson.

“A contractor that had come out and done our roof in guttering was actually a really good friend of one of the grandsons of Peterson,” McCormick said. “We’re working on making connections with that family as well.”

They hope Allen, Jr. and Peterson’s family members will reach out to help finish connecting the dots.

To give more information about the vets and their families, contact McCormick at [email protected]. For more information about the program, contact McCormick or Lynne O’Hara at [email protected].