Thursday, October 1, 2026
Five Seaford High School alumni were killed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and their names continue to shape generations of students through an award built not around grades, but around the qualities their families believed defined them: service, character and commitment.
The Seaford 9/11 Memorial Committee’s Patriot Award is presented annually to graduating Seaford High seniors, carrying a $2,000 scholarship and a distinction that recipients say stays with them long after graduation. Roughly five or six students are selected each year through an anonymous, weeks-long process.
For 2021 recipient Giana Cesario, the money helped pay for college, books and other educational expenses. But she said she did not even know there was a scholarship attached when she applied.
“It was really about the honor,” Cesario said. When her name was announced at graduation, she recalled, “I actually started crying on stage.”
Cesario, 24, recently earned her master’s degree in literacy and cognition after completing a five-year childhood, special and general education program at St. Joseph’s University. Her commitment to service has continued: After participating in Best Buddies at Seaford High School, including serving as president, she co-founded a Best Buddies chapter at St. Joseph’s.
She has also remained involved with the Patriot Award, returning to mentor new recipients as they prepare speeches for the committee’s annual dinner.
That continued involvement is precisely what committee chairman Tom Condon hoped the award would inspire when he helped establish it after Sept. 11, 2001.
Condon, who worked in the Seaford school district for 48 years as an educator, guidance counselor and coach, knew all five alumni who were killed: Tom and Tim Haskell, John Perry, Robert Sliwak, and Michael Wittenstein. Shortly after the attacks, he began working with their families to determine how Seaford should preserve their memory.
The families wanted an award, Condon recalled, but made one point clear.
“We want to do like an award or a scholarship, but we don’t want it to be based on grades,” Condon recalled them saying. “All five guys weren’t all great students, but they’re all great guys.”
By January 2002, the families had accepted Condon’s proposed selection model. There would be no consideration of grades, and the award would instead center on three principles: “service, character, and commitment.” Michael Wittenstein’s father, Arnold, supplied its name: the Patriot Award.
That philosophy remains embedded in an unusually intensive selection process.
Applicants are assigned numbers so reviewers initially do not know their identities. Their school and community involvement and responses to three short questions are scored before finalists advance. References are interviewed, and relatives of the five alumni personally interview finalists before the committee deliberates and votes. The process takes about five weeks.
Seaford High Principal Nicole Schnabel, herself a member of the Memorial Committee, said the award is woven into the district’s broader effort to teach students about Sept. 11 and the people behind the names on the memorial outside their school.
“We look for three things in the students: service, their level of service, their level of character,” Schnabel said. “And commitment. Are they committed in the long term?”
The connection begins well before senior year. Students learn about service in elementary school, encounter the history of Sept. 11 in middle school and are introduced to the Patriot Award again at ninth-grade orientation. Seniors also visit the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in Manhattan.
For Schnabel, that continuity reflects a deliberate choice about how Seaford speaks about Sept. 11. Rather than simply saying “never forget,” she said, the community uses another phrase.
“We say, ‘always remember,’” Schnabel said. “We’re always going to remember these people.”
A quarter-century after the award began, its recipients have become part of that remembrance themselves — returning as mentors, volunteers and committee participants and passing its principles to another generation.
“The Patriot Award itself,” Condon said, “is really powerful.”
To read more from the Herald's Remembering 9/11, 25th anniversary special section, click here.
