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SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Today, schools across Yellowknife will hold assemblies honouring volunteers, school programs, and community gardens for their contribution to green-initiatives, but the work that really makes a difference in our environment happens year-round.

Ariana Sundberg, in front, fastidiously plants blue tulip bulbs while Laiza Ann Koyina opens her package of seeds. The classroom garden features dahlias, tulips, tomatoes, peppers, beans, peas, among many others. - Lyndsay Herman/NNSL photo

The schools profiled in this feature run varied and inspirational programs that teach and involve students in recycling, composting, and environmental awareness. Many schools in the city shared their environmentally-friendly programs for students with Yellowknifer and we can say this is by no means an exhaustive list.

If the students of Yellowknife are any indication of our future, it is certainly looking pretty green.

Students and staff at Kaw Tay Whee School in Dettah take great pride in their indoor classroom garden. The produce it grows is put directly into the school-wide lunch program offered to all 27 students from kindergarten to Grade 6.

Scraps from lunch are composted and worked into the soil of future gardens. The school's science teacher, Neil Penney, expects the soil's quality to improve as the program picks up momentum in future years. Even still, this year is a big improvement.

"We are just starting to get some good stuff," he said.

The goal, said principal Lea Lamoureux, is to make the indoor garden program as sustainable as possible.

Currently, the garden doesn't produce enough to serve the entire lunch program, but it does make a significant impact on the kids' understanding of food.

"Before we started, we asked the kids where vegetables came from," said Penney, "And they said, 'A grocery store.' They just didn't know you could grow it, that it came from the ground."

He said some students were leery of eating a carrot grown in the garden because it came from, what seemed to be, an unrecognizable source.

"Now that the program's going, you can ask them where food comes from and they'll say, 'A farm' or 'a garden,'" he said.

The staff encourages student choice and involvement as much as possible. For instance, students are enlisted to pick what should be made of the produce they grow.

"Last year, potatoes did really well. We had enough for three meals," said Penney. "The kids decided how we should eat them. Mashed, oven fries, baked."

Penney also said the students grew enough tomatoes last year to make spaghetti sauce from vegetables grown in the garden.

Students can be as fully or minimally involved in the cooking as they want to be but are encouraged to help out if they're interested.

"They're just like adults," Penny said, "some are into it, some aren't quite as much."

The plant cycles run year-round and use a combination of natural light, artificial light and hydroponics. They are primarily grown indoors but some get moved in pots outside just before summer. Students also take plants like snap peas and beans home for the summer to test their green thumb outside of the classroom.

This is the first year the school will be growing a variety of flowers with vegetables, save for one summer where each student took home a marigold plant. "We will never say no to trying something," said Lamoureux. "But we tried to steer away from flowers at first because we wanted to focus on growing our own food."

Lamoureux said BHP Billiton's contribution to the Hands-on Science Education program four years ago helped make the garden a reality. "We were able to purchase hydroponics, light tables," she said, "It was a fantastic start to the program."

Now, help comes in the form of Gene Hachey, an agriculture, agri-foods and commercial wildlife development consultant for the Department of Industry, Tourism and Investment, via the department's Small Scale Foods program.

"He's brought us seeds, soil, so many things we need," said Lamoureux.

Hachey says he's thrilled with the amount of community support the school has for the garden and says that's the real source of its success.

"I don't want to be taking any credit for the hard work they're doing." he said. "We facilitate but its the community that took the project and ran with it."

The garden received a boost last year when Penny was awarded the Northwest Territories and Nunavut Association of Professional Geologists Science Teaching Award. The award included $1,000 toward the school's science program, a portion of which went to the indoor garden. The remainder was used to purchase microscopes and hands-on learning materials.

Ecole Alain St. Cyr backs up education about the importance of recycling with the added incentive of fundraising for exciting school trips.

The school uses recycling opportunities, among other fundraising programs, to help fund senior students' exchange trips to places like Quebec or, as is the case for March 2013, in Senegal, Africa.

The exchange trip occurs every second year for one to two weeks and uses recycling proceeds to fund it.

Classrooms have a bag for juice and bottles that keep the recyclables out of school garbage cans. Every two weeks, Grade 9 students go around the school and collect the bags from each class. The students sort the cans, plastic bottles and glass into separate bins at the school. At the end of the month, a volunteer parent or staff member take the sorted recyclables to the bottle depot and gives the money from the returns back to the school.

"We collect about $200 over six weeks from recycling," said Ecole Alain St. Cyr principal Yvonne Careen.

The school also uses proceeds from the NorthwesTel Telephone Directory Recycling Program to help with trip costs. Students are asked to collect outdated NorthwesTel telephone books from their families, friends, and neighbours and bring them into a school collection box. NorthwesTel sends the old directories to recycling depots in the south and estimates that the program has saved more than 102,000 telephone books from winding up in landfills across the NWT, Yukon and northern British Columbia.

In return for the books, schools receive money to put toward activities and programs of the school's choice, with the amount depending on how many books were collected. Careen said the amount her school receives varies year-to-year, depending on how many telephone books students can get their hands on, but estimates they get $250-$750 each year they participate.

Apart from fundraising, students are also taught about compost and paper recycling practises. All classrooms have a bin where students put lunch leftovers instead of in the garbage. At the end of the week, a student from each class takes the leftovers to a composting bin at the back of the school.

The city then picks up the compost, along with compost from neighbouring William McDonald school, and takes it the Yellowknife Centralized Compost Facility.

Pack of Eco-Wolves compost at Weledeh When Elizabeth Monroe, a teacher at Weledeh Catholic School, saw the enthusiasm her class showed for recycling, she also saw an opportunity to turn that enthusiasm into a composting and recycling club for students.

"Once I built up the interest it was easy to grow the program from there," she said.

As of last Friday, the club's first day in action, Monroe's army of "green" students, called Eco-Wolves, had 45 student volunteers from Grades 3 to 7. The club's current responsibility is to collect small compost buckets twice a week from kindergarten to Grade 4 classrooms and take them to a larger compost bin behind the Weledeh Community Garden. Monroe plans for the group to take over paper and plastic recycling at the school in the future, but would like to focus on composting first.

"It reduces our footprint by reducing what we sent to the landfill," said Monroe. "And as a bonus, gives our garden buddies (at the Weledeh Community Garden) what they need. Because of where we are it'll be about two years before the compost is ready, but we're excited. Our garden is coming full circle."

Monroe and the school's principal, Simone Gessler, said Ecology North has been a big help in making composting at the school possible. Monroe said Ecology North provided Weledeh with the classroom compost buckets, the outdoor composting bin, as well as pots, seeds and dirt for planting activities on the school's Faith Alive Day that took place on March 2.

The day was akin to an Earth Day celebration where students learned about the environment and sustainable living practises from a Christian perspective.

Since then, a team from Ecology North held a talk with some of the Eco-Wolves about different types of composting that happens in Yellowknife and how to keep the classroom compost bins clean using old newspapers as liners.

The Eco-Wolves compliment an already strong, student-driven recycling program. "The Grade 4 to 8 students have started up a paper, plastic, and bottle recycling program," stated Gessler in an e-mail about "green" practises at the school.

Monroe said it's the students' enthusiasm that makes these programs so successful. When she began teaching a literacy class that focused on the environment and recycling, she found that students really embraced what they were learning. As students learned why recycling was important, they were eager to apply those practises to other areas of the school.

"They wanted to have (recycling bins) in their own homerooms," she said. "It was the kids that wanted us to put them there.

"I have two recycling bins and one garbage can in my room, and I don't think I ever have one full bag at the end of the day anymore. It used to be mostly paper."

The 225 students of J. H. Sissons School, accompanied by their teachers, will participate in a Walk for Wildlife event around Yellowknife on April 27.

Walk for Wildlife is part of the Canadian Wildlife Federation's 50th anniversary celebration, where communities across Canada are encouraged to go outside and experience nature in their region.

At J.H. Sissons, students and teachers will collect litter along a route that loops from J.H. Sissons School, northwest to city hall, east to Ruth Inch Memorial Pool, and, back to the school by way of Forrest Drive.

Kindergarten teacher, Jacqueline Beland, is using the walk as an opportunity to show her class what it means to be socially responsible. Recently, each student made a model house out of small boxes, lightly used and obtained from local businesses, and will place their house on a floor map of a model community. Kids will return to school on the following day to see their model community polluted by garbage and litter, instigating a talk about what can be done to clean everything up.

"It's their work of art," said Beland, "And they take offence to the community they made being polluted. That ties in to the walk because we can say, 'How I feel about this big city is the same as how you felt about your small city.'"

Alex Fast, a kindergarten student in Beland's class, already has strong feelings about the importance of reusing and recycling paper in his class. "We should recycle so that we don't waste too much of the planet," he said. "We use trees to make houses, cabins, and card games. I like wood and I don't want to use it all on paper."

As students enter higher grades, recycling bottles, cardboard and compost enter into their sustainable living education. When students reach Grade 4 they are now responsible for recycling the juice boxes and bottles from each of the school's classrooms. Every month, four Grade 4 students are selected to collect, sort and empty the juice containers and competition for the job is fierce.

"When somebody is not there for their turn and our teacher asks for volunteers, so many people put up their hands. So many!" said Grade 4 student, Emmanuel Lamvh. "It's because everyone really wants to volunteer."

Aduroa Donison, J. H. Sissons' parent advisory committee chair, said the school has also started using dishes instead of disposable plates and cups for events and fundraisers that serve food and drinks.

"At the last dance, I would say there were 270 people," said Donison.

"We had about 150 plates and (the volunteers) kept circling, picking them up and washing them throughout the night."

Donison estimated that 200-250 disposable plates would have been used at an event like that before the school made the switch.

Grade 5 teacher Monique Marinier said the school often partners sustainable practises with healthy eating. For instance, the winner of the school's Drop the Pop competition, which rewards students who have the most vegetable, fruit and dairy servings in their lunch boxes, was awarded a fruit smoothie at lunch which was served in a washable, re-useable glass.

The principal of J.H. Sissons School, Paul Bennett, said he is glad to see burgeoning momentum in practises like recycling.

"It's in the families and in the schools," he said. "It's really beginning to be a family belief, and it's a family belief we have here."

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