Community Dedication
For Memorial Garden
In honor of students that died while attending Bourne schools, the Bourne School Committee's Student Memorial Subcommittee will hold a special ceremony on Sunday, May 5, dedicating the recently completed Bourne Student Memorial Garden.
As many as 300 people are expected to attend the event, scheduled to take place at 1 P.M. at the Bourne school campus.
The program will include the names of all 28 students whose names appear on the memorial, as well as poems written by some of them.
Students from the Massachusetts Maritime Academy will present the colors and the Bourne High School chorus will perform two specially selected songs. Refreshments will be served at Bourne Middle School following the ceremony.
“We've been very busy getting all of this together and we hope it's something the families and the community will appreciate,” said student memorial subcommittee member Debbie Juckett.
Invitations have been sent to the families of all 28 students included in the memorial, as well as to teachers, administrators, and various local and state officials.
Located between the high school and middle school, the memorial garden was made possible thanks to the efforts of many in the community.
Students from the Upper Cape Cod Regional Technical School in Bourne, under the direction of Masonry instructor, Robert Fleurent, and shop coordinator, Leo Bedard, laid the brickwork for the memorial, installed electrical wiring, and helped with some landscaping around the garden.
The Bourne DPW provided the large boulder engraved with a butterfly and the words "You are ever a part of our lives."
Johnson Electric Supply Inc. of Sagamore Beach supplied the lights for the memorial garden. Robert and Julie Johnson's daughter Laura is one of the Bourne students included in the memorial.
John and Diane McKernan of Pocasset donated two weeping cherry trees for the garden. And voters approved $30,000 for the memorial at the May 2000 town meeting.
“It's been quite a community effort,” Mrs. Juckett said.
The idea for the student memorial garden arose following the death of the McKernan's son, William (Billy) McKernan. Billy died in October 1999, following an all- terrain vehicle accident in Plymouth. He was 14 at the time and a ninth grader at Bourne High.
Following Billy's death, his father urged the school committee to name the newly constructed middle school after his son, as a way to remember Billy and to bring awareness to organ donation.
The school committee decided, to name the school Bourne Middle School as it had always been called, but offered to honor Billy and other students who had died too soon by building a student memorial on the Bourne campus.
Mrs. McKernan regularly attended memorial subcommittee meetings and provided input into the memorial's design.
Other members of the sub-committee are school committee chairman John Harrington, former Lyle Middle School Principal Mary Fuller, middle school teacher Donna McGonagle, Reverend Sandra Smith, and parent Michael Tierney of Sagamore Beach.
