Vision

I have featured climate action and educated on climate change throughout the Grade 7 Science content this year. To select a project, I held a brainstorm and students identified that ‘garbage’ was a main concern within the Maskwacis community and it is a major concern for land, water, and community health. We chose to educate our school on how much garbage is wasted in a day within our breakfast, lunch, and classroom areas. We are hosting a “Garbage Look” day wherein we are going to dump and display all garbages onto chart paper to demonstrate how much paper, food and packaging waste is taken to landfills each day. This information has informed us that we can take steps within our own school to separate garbage and specifically impact our dirt and soil health by composting and minimizing the amount of food waste. We are building our school’s first compost center, wherein we can daily throw kitchen scraps from vegetables and fruit but also the waste that is collected during our two, school-wide meal times. This composted soil will then be used, moving forward to enrich our flower beds and garden beds, with the hope of growing food here at school. We have a community partner, Nipiy Water Management, which is the water warriors that manage water cleanliness and safety within the Band community.

Action

We have a student-active initiative to clear area, construct and operate a outdoor composting area. Ground was cleared and framing was constructed within our Land-based learning time. In collaboration with our division maintenance crew, concrete slabs were brought in to house the 3 Compost Tumblers that we were able to purchase with the grant money. Moving forward, the daily collection of kitchen scraps will be combined with our Nanâtohk Mîciwin – Universal School Foods Strategy, https://www.maskwacised.ca/cs/usfp program that has all of our students feasting eating two full meals at school everyday. Our kitchen staff will collect and sort scraps accordingly for our student teams to take out to the Compost Tumblers.
To have a full circle vision, the soil that will be composted will be used in our growing program to ensure that we can education on sustainable living and good garden growing practices. We have 2 gardent bed areas that have seasonal