On Wednesday, March 12th, the Hope Lions Club conducted a field trip for all the fifth grade students in Hempstead County.
Students from Beryl Henry, Hope Academy of Public Service, Spring Hill, Blevins and Garrett Memorial Christian School gathered in Hempstead Hall on the campus of University of Arkansas Hope Texarkana. They were participating in a project called Liberty Day, sponsored by the Hope Lions Club. The day is designed to teach fifth grade students the rights and obligations of citizenship.
The day began in the theater with a lesson on geography as it was in the 1600s, before there was a United States. Emphasis was placed on why so many people at that time felt persecuted in Europe and wanted to move to the New World.
The students moved into the ballroom for a series of lectures, bedtime stories, quizzes and videos. They spent the day following the timeline of events from the late 1600s for the next hundred years as America became a country with its own government.
There were lessons on the Founding Fathers and the cooperation between the colonists and the Native Americans. The students were told of the injustices experienced by the colonist: the Boston Massacre, the Tea Tax, the Intolerable Tax among these. They learned of the colonists’ reaction in holding colonial conventions that led to the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the outbreak of the American Revolution.
The students were shown that after the Revolution ended in the Treaty of Paris in 1783, there were four years afterward when the 13 states were not yet completely united. In 1787, delegates from the states met in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, deciding on what would be included in a new constitution establishing a more powerful central government with checks and balances among three branches. This led to the lessons for the day concluding with a study of the first amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights.
The students were also treated to lunch provided by a combination of area merchants, including Super One and Hope Baking Company. The meal was cooked and served by Hope Lions volunteers. Several members of the UAHT staff also took part in planning and carrying out tasks that were needed so that Liberty Day would succeed.
The count of students revealed that 241 10 and 11-year-olds from every elementary school in Hempstead County had gathered in one room, perhaps the first and only time the county’s graduating class of 2032 will have done so.
