The essay instructions began "Pretend you were alive during the War of 1812 and had a friend who has become famous in history because of standing up for America during that exciting but dangerous time."

From there it was up to participating students in grades 5-8 to summon both their creativity and patriotic spirit into roughly 300 to 600 historically accurate and inspiring words - free of spelling and grammatical errors, of course.

On March 3rd, winners were announced and, much to the delight of the St. Francis Xavier Academy community, 6th grader Shawn H., was among them. Shawn is a State Winner and, in recognition of his excellence he received a State Certificate and Silver Medal at the DC DAR State Conference on March 10th.

Way to go Shawn!