Teacher of the Year Media Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Gilroy High School Teacher Wins National Award for Helping
Preserve Legacy of the “Greatest Generation”
(November 1, 2008, New York) Darren Yafai, a high school teacher from Gilroy, California, will
be honored as the 2008 Stories of Service Teacher of the Year during Veterans Day ceremonies in
Washington, D.C. and New York City. Yafai is being recognized for participating with 165 of
his students at Gilroy High School in the Stories of Service program last semester.
Stories of Service is a national initiative that encourages youth to use their technology skills to
document the first hand memories of the men and women who experienced World War II and the
defining events of the past century. Students interview seniors from their community, and use
computers to produce short “digital stories” about their lives that are archived on the Stories of
Service website so that they can be shared with schools, libraries, museums, and the public.. The
non profit educational program is being promoted by National History Day, the History Channel,
the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute and other organizations.
Yafai will be flown this week to Washington, D.C. where he will be honored at the National
Veterans Day Conference and join Stories of Service national spokesperson Edith Shain and Dr.
Robert Sutton, chief historian of the National Parks Service, in laying the Veterans Day wreath at
the National World War II Memorial. Ms. Shain, was the nurse who appeared in the iconic photo
of her being kissed by a joyous sailor in Times Square on the day World War II ended which
appeared on the cover of Life Magazine. Dr. Sutton is a senior advisor to the Stories of Service
program.
Yafai and Shain will attend a series of public events and appearances in New York City to
officially launch the Stories of Service 2009 national campaign, including taking part in the
Nation’s Veterans Day Parade, on Tuesday, November 11. Ms. Shain, now 90, is a native of
New York, is one of the Grand Marshals for this year’s parade.
“I am really pleased that our Gilroy students have brought this kind of national recognition to our
school and our community,” said Yafai. “I hope that their example will inspire other students
throughout America to take part in this exciting intergenerational program so that we can save
these firsthand accounts of an important part of our nation’s—and the world’s—history, before
they are lost forever.”
Yafai plans to continue to involve his history classes in the Stories of Service program during the
current school year, and plans to send a group of his students to Washington, D.C. to attend the
National Stories of Service Memorial Day Rally next May. He and his students are finishing a
video that documents how they students worked with 26 seniors from their community to produce
their videos last semester as a class project. The videos have been showing on the web site of the
Gilroy Dispatch during the summer.
For more information visit www.Stories -of-Service.org, or contact [email protected], or call
917-449-5905.