The efforts of students, teachers and staff at Sacred Heart School/École Sacré Coeur at making their school environmentally friendly may soon be getting some well-deserved recognition. The school is a semi-finalist in Staples Canada’s Superpower Your School contest. Sacred Heart School/École Sacré Coeur is among the first round of finalists, which include 20 other schools from Western Canada.
“It’s pretty cool to be recognized, for sure. It was about putting forward everything we’ve been doing in the last couple of years, when it comes to the environment at our school,” said Grade 8 teacher Christa Walton. “Even when we feel like we’re not doing a whole lot, we listed out and are being recognized for the things we’ve been doing. We’ve done some pretty cool things as a school and community. We didn’t think we’d make the list, so we’re pretty proud of ourselves.”
Walton noted that the school applied for the award a few years ago, but didn’t make the semi-finals. Looking back over the last two or three years, many at the school were quick to assume the accomplishments of the school in moving toward a cleaner environment weren’t enough to qualify them for the contest.
However, upon the insistence of principal Amber Hillstrom, Walton entered the school for this year’s contest, listing the many environmental efforts Sacred Heart School/École Sacré Coeur has undertaken lately.
When we listed everything, we realized that every single person at the school was involved in our initiatives,” said Walton. “We put together what we knew was going on at our school, at all grade-levels, so in that sense, it was a combined effort for everyone in every grade.
“Certain classrooms take on their own projects. Some have combined with the board to do cleanups of the schoolyard or planting special gardens. Projects are usually spearheaded by one or two grades, but the whole school ends up participating.”
Environmental initiatives that the school has undertaken include establishing itself as a bottle-free zone five years ago, extending observance of Earth Day at the school to an entire Earth Week, participating in a city-wide cleanup and having several localized cleanup efforts on school grounds.
The school is also an idle-free zone, the result of a partnership between Walton’s Grade 8 class last year, and the city, to create a bylaw to mandate zero idling at Sacred Heart School /École Sacré Coeur. This was the school’s first taste of recognition, winning a berth among the top 11 finalists in the Samsung Solve For Tomorrow contest, and receiving $20,000 worth of technology that included numerous tablets and a camera.
“It’s been over five years in the making, but we have six special gardens we keep up within our schoolyard, one having a teepee and native plants around it,” said Walton. “Also, all teachers, upon retirement, plant a tree in the schoolyard. We are part of the local recycling program. The proceeds of that pay for two foster children the school supports.”
One class recently got money from the board to beautify the grounds of the school, maintaining green spaces, using wood chips, grass seed and various plants to rehabilitate areas that hadn’t recovered well from construction that recently was done around the school.
Another significant schoolyard effort to clean up and improve the environment involved a garbage can painted to resemble the robotic Star Wars character, R2-D2, entitled: R2TREE2.
“They painted a garbage can to look like the droid, and what happened was that if people saw someone cleaning up trash that wasn’t theirs, they could enter that person’s name, and prizes would be available throughout the year,” said Walton. “It was a ‘caught being good and cleaning up’-kind of thing, last year.”
Walton said that when she looked at what the school did every year, individually, it didn’t seem significant, but that “when you put it on paper, it looks spectacular.”
The final 10 winning schools, selected from five different regions, will receive $25,000 for the purchase of new technology, from Staples Canada. The winners will be announced on April 22.
