Hello St. E’s Community,
I hope that, like me, you are taking moments to enjoy and appreciate all of the green and new flowers we’re beginning to see around the city once again. Spring brings a lot of newness and fresh energy, especially at our school. We take Earth Day — and Earth Month — pretty seriously around here, and getting to celebrate it in various ways throughout our classrooms is always a special experience.
It’s necessary for all of us to recognize the importance of keeping Mother Earth clean, safe, and protected, as a healthy planet means healthy lives for us all! While sometimes the big issues like climate change and pollution can seem intimidating or like we can’t make a difference, it truly all starts with what we can do as individuals to elicit change. Our first graders, for example, recognized that air pollution is a problem in more urban areas, and they wanted to do something about that. As they worked with first-grade teacher Alex Meallet, they came up with their own unique experiment to test the air quality inside and outside the classroom. These types of experiments are so important for gathering data that informs us when we brainstorm solutions or make decisions down the road!
We also have six very ambitious and caring fourth-graders who have recently started the Composting for Change group in an effort to improve our school’s waste management. Working together with the fourth-grade teaching team Kira Hellyer and Hilario Garfio-Sanchez and any St. E’s student willing to volunteer their time and effort for the cause, these students are actively working on setting up a composting program, building a website for volunteers to sign up, and coordinating with St. E’s administrators on how to set up a service that includes bins in their pick up service. That is incredible! It just goes to show how passionate our students are about doing good for their community and the planet and taking something and leaving it better than they found it, which is what Earth Day is all about.
Our eighth-graders have also been hard at work cultivating hydroponic tower gardens that they not only use to improve their growing and gardening skills by learning about pH and what nutrients plants need to grow but also then harvest to make their own fresh and organically grown salads! There is something about that journey from acquiring knowledge and planting a seed to then reaping the goodness that you’ve sewn that touches my heart. It assures me that St. E’s students know exactly how important loving and caring for our planet is, and that all it takes to make change happen is to start with an idea. The support and the trying and failing — and trying again — will follow.
Earth Month isn’t quite over yet, so I encourage you to do one small thing that helps our Mother Earth in some way, whether that’s recycling or composting or planting a seed. Seeing our students’ joy in doing their part for our planet brings me joy, and I hope it does the same for you.
Best foot forward,
Adriana Murphy
Head of School
PS: Can’t wait to plant my herbs from the SESPA Plant Sale! Thank you, SESPA!
