GALLERY: Open house celebrates students, history involved at Riverside Cemetery

By Kate Hayden, khayden@charlescitypress.com

There was never a quiet moment in the cemetery on Friday.

Charles City residents turned out en masse to visit Riverside Cemetery’s open house during the afternoon, and celebrate the year’s progress made by a determined class of eighth-graders.

Charles City Middle School students offered maps and guidance as residents entered the gates, directing visitors to performances, coding projects, memorials and more student-led initiatives impacting the historical landmark.

Many of the projects have much more time to go, teacher Ryan Rahmiller said. Students are preparing to work into the summer and their first year of high school to continue their initiatives, which were established this past October.

“These are just incredible kids. We’re really going to miss them next year,” Rahmiller said, standing among tombstones a few feet away from the historic chapel. “They’re going to do incredible things at the high school.”

Rahmiller and his colleagues are ready to help students into the summer, including the documentary film crew, who are planning a showing at the Charles Theater around July 4; the chapel preservation group, which is planning restoration and repair projects to the building; and the shed-raising group, which wants to build a storage space for maintenance crew workers at the cemetery.

“Having a partner like Jeff [Sisson] — we couldn’t have done it without him. He’s really been a key part,” Rahmiller said. “The community’s been great too, just an outpouring of support. We’ve hardly ever heard the word ‘no.’”

Nick Aikey, Ricki Walls, Hope Slinger and Aaliyah Jackson have documented three rows of 13,000 graves in Riverside to be part of a grave-finder mobile app the students are coding. The students had to completely restart the coding process earlier this spring after continued problems with the website they originally used.

Standing in front of the tombstones they’ve completed recording, the students were talked to visitors who came for both the open house, and visitors setting out flags and cleaning up graves for Memorial Day.

“This is one of the biggest projects we’ve ever done,” Slinger said.

“It’s very different. We’ve never done anything with the cemetery, or really community-wise. It’s really open,” Jackson said. “It’s definitely been harder, but it’s worth it.”

After Friday’s open house, the eighth-grade class has one week of school left — and Rahmiller and his colleagues will start talking about projects in store for next year’s class. Some of this year’s projects, like the grave finder app, will need to be continued by incoming students.

“We’re still trying to answer that. We don’t know yet,” Rahmiller said. “We brought them out here in October, and sat them down right over there. … Jeff explained the history of the cemetery and what some of its needs are. At no point did he ever say, ‘this has to be done, this has to be done.’ We went back to the school and we said, ‘How can we make Riverside into a really neat place that people can go and learn from?’

“We’ll have to see where next year’s class takes us with that passion,” he added.

It was a learning experience in the broadest sense of the phrase for students Danielle Stock, Kiki Connell and Nicole Concepcion, who worked with classmates Toni Maloy and Nia Litterer on a bike trail pitch back in October.

“With the bike trail, the problem was the railroad, and we couldn’t get over [the tracks] without making an overpass, which would conflict with the trains,” Connell said in between brief presentations with cemetery visitors.

A concrete pathway for the bike trail wasn’t going to work. Instead, the eighth grade students established the first certified bird sanctuary in Iowa along the original path.

“What we really learned is a lot of planning goes into actually doing a project,” Concepcion said. “The bike trail — people were planning this for years but we were the first ones to get it rolling, because people were so busy with their lives. Even now, it’s still taking a lot of time.”

There’s no timeline for when their work on the birding sanctuary will wrap up. The group wants to clear some of the brush out on the pathway, and perhaps install fencing to separate city-owned property from private landowners nearby.

“When we were going to do an actual, paving bike trail, we were thinking senior year,” Connell said. “This one is going to be a lot shorter, but our group is all OK with working on it over the summer.”

Eighth-grade teachers like Rahmiller are planning for summer build days with the soon-to-be freshmen.

“We’ve got to wrap some things up and send them the message — this doesn’t end,” Rahmiller said. “We had a long conversation with the chapel [restoration] group. ‘You guys bought into this, you’ve got to keep this going.’ The feedback we got from them was incredibly positive. They all [said] ‘yep, we’re going to make this happen, keep this going.’”

With a single middle school-high school campus in Charles City, “We’re literally a hundred meters from them,” Rahmiller said. “We can say during their SMART lunch, ‘hey, today we’re going to go work on that chapel, what do you say?’”

“With this group, I have complete faith that we’re going to continue to make progress on this thing,” he added.  

Next year, the incoming eighth grade class will have neighbors at the high school who will understand their challenges — and encourage them to chase their goals.

“We didn’t ever think we’d get this far,” Walls said, looking back at the tombstones her group had coded into the app. “We thought we wanted to all give up, but we stayed strong.”

“Focus on the small things first. If you look at the bigger picture, you’ll be overwhelmed,” Concepcion said. “The smaller things will help you focus more, you’ll get more done than if you looked at the bigger picture.

“We’ve accomplished a lot, honestly. I’m actually really proud of us.”