Retired social studies teacher Norm Conard and one of his former students, Megan Stewart-Felt, from the Irena Sendler Project recently opened the Lowell Milken Center in Ft. Scott, Kan.
The center assists teachers and students worldwide in creating projects that teach respect and understanding among people regardless of race, religion or creed. The center encourages education projects that feature unsung heroes, like Sendler, as role models to “repair the world.”
Funded by the Milken family, a leading U.S. philanthropy, the center is assisting in the production of a student-written documentary about the community of Silvis, Ill. The project will document the story of how one street in Silvis came to be named Hero Street.
The history of Hero Street is dramatic: Large numbers of Mexicans came to Silvis after World War I to work in manufacturing shops and strengthen a workforce diminished by the war. These large immigrant families could not find homes, so they moved into boxcars north of the town’s railroad tracks. Later they were forced to move their makeshift homes to what then was Second Street so they would have to pay property taxes and utilities.
It is believed that 57 men from that street went to fight in World War II and Korea; eight never returned. The street reportedly contributed more men to military service in the two wars than any other place of comparable size in the U.S., and the town renamed it Hero Street in 1969.
The center, opened just a few weeks ago, will launch a Web site in the next several weeks: www.lowellmilkencenter.org.
