SANFORD — There’s a small memorial stone at Notre Dame cemetery in Springvale etched with the name Paul Lesperance. The granite memorial gives the year of his birth, 1908, and of his death in 1944. It notes he was awarded a purple heart.

His stone, and those of many others who fought and died for their country were scrubbed clean on Monday by students in the eighth-grade band class at Sanford Junior High School.

It is a task each eighth grade class has taken on for the last several years, part of the annual Fallen Veterans Project that culminates next week with ceremonies at Sanford Performing Arts Center, ahead of Memorial Day.

Lesperance was listed as missing in action. He was among those aboard the  SS Leopoldville headed for the Battle of the Bulge, when the Belgian troop ship was sunk by a German submarine off the coast of Cherbourg, France, on Christmas Day in 1944.

He is among 11 MIA veterans of  World War II and Korea who will be honored this year, along with the late Capt. Daniel Tranchemontagne, a U.S. Army reservist who served in Kuwait in Operation Iraqi Freedom and died of cancer in 2004 at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

For the stone cleaning portion of the project, the students board a school bus to five cemeteries where the memorial or grave stones of those who perished in combat mark forever their existence on the earth and their sacrifice to their country.

They go to St. Ignatius and Notre Dame cemeteries, Oakdale and Riverside, and to Evergreen Cemetery in Alfred, applying stone cleaner and Simply Green to remove the dirt and grime that can accumulate from one year to another. They clip grass around the stones and mark each with a pot of flowers. And if they finish with time remaining until the bus arrives for the next cemetery, they seek out the stone of other veterans and scrub them too.

Perhaps this year the 53 stones aren’t as dirty as they could be, because of prior eighth grade band students who started cleaning them four or five years ago, said student Emma-Jeanne Dudley. Still, there’s some dirt to remove, and the grit that accumulates in the engraved letters, and other tidying up.

“It’s great to see the progress — the before and after,” said student Rhylie Hill.

Emma Westgate, sliding a scrub brush across a stone, said she enjoyed the research that went along with the project.

There’s also a local historical tie to it all — which the students study because in addition to the stone cleaning project, each band member composes a musical piece for a fallen veteran being honored.

Dudley’s composition is called “I’m Coming Home,” for Lt. Ralph Hanson who died in France in 1944.

After their work, the students sat for a bit before boarding the bus to head back to school.

“It’s cool we can clean it off,” said Frank Hagen of the dirt on the stones. “And it’s sad at the same time, seeing all these people who died in war.”

— Senior Staff Writer Tammy Wells can be contacted at 780-9016 or twells@journaltribune.com.