Zach and JonMichael Fenimore, who are in 8th and 6th grades respectively at Truman Middle School in Grand Prairie, think that what they did was no big deal. And that is why their effort to do the right thing is Thursday’s "Tell Me Something Good."
"We just helped someone. We were just doing what we would do daily," Jon Michael Fenimore said about the brothers’ patriotic intervention.
The Fenimore brothers were walking home from school last week when they noticed that the American flag was still flying above their former school, Dickinson Elementary. And they just knew that if ‘Mr. Epps’ — Jim Epps, the longtime crossing guard at Dickinson and a retired Navy veteran, who was featured on NBC DFW last fall — was around that day then there was no way the flag would still be up.
So Zach and JonMichael did what Mr. Epps taught them to do, and what they continue to do daily at Truman Middle as members of the Junior Cadet Corps — a precursor to the Junior ROTC — which is lower the flag themselves.
Only after their effort did the brothers learn that the reason Mr. Epps had not lowered the flag himself is because he suffered a medical emergency earlier that day and had been taken to the hospital. Epps has since been released and is reportedly on the mend.
The Fenimore brothers also did not know at the time that a Grand Prairie Independent School District employee had snapped a photo of them dutifully folding the flag after taking it down. The employee then shared the photo with the head of communications for the district, who posted on the district’s Facebook page.
"I see students doing a good deed," Gay Lynn Broom said about her desire to share the Fenimore brothers’ effort with the world. "That’s character. What you do when no one is looking, that’s character. And that is what we want to highlight and show that we have amazing students in Grand Prairie ISD."
