Breaking (almost) all the rules
A fundraiser earns students from St. Albert big rewards for WE Day
For one day each year, students at Neil M. Ross Catholic School in St. Albert can buy a single rule to break.
It’s Break A Rule Day, and students from Kindergarten through to Grade 6 can choose to wear a silly hat in class, chew gum, play video games or even get out of a homework assignment.
The annual event, held in June, is a fundraiser to provide clean water in a WE Villages community in Kenya. Organized by the Grade 6 WE Club, it is easily the most anticipated event in the school year.
“It’s something that students look forward to moving into our Grade 6,” says Grade 6 teacher Erin Sawchuck, the group’s coordinator. “They want to be a part of it and see what happens every year with it.”
Sophia Gerace, 13, remembers the year she and her team organized their Break A Rule Day.
“My favourite part was seeing the looks on the little kid’s faces,” recalls Sophia, now in Grade 8 at nearby Richard S. Fowler Catholic Junior High. “They were always so happy to wear PJs and eat junk food in class. You know, do everything you can’t do on a regular basis.”
School administrators started the WE Club nine years ago, as a way to help connect the school to global issues such as food insecurity and lack of water access. But it was a small group of enthusiastic Grade 6 students who came up with the idea for the event in 2014, after returning from WE Day Alberta.
WE Day Alberta, which will be held this year on Tuesday, October 22 at Rogers Place in Edmonton, is a unique celebration of a year of transformative action. The event brings together world-renowned speakers, A-list performers and 16,000 students from over 500 schools all over the province.
You can’t buy a ticket to WE Day, instead students earn their way there through local and global actions.
For Sophia, her WE Day experience in 2017 was a chance to see her idol, country music star Lindsay Ell. “It was really cool, we got to sit in the nosebleeds, we got to see everyone.”
From the beginning, Break A Rule Day proved an immediate success. Within two years of introducing it, the WE Club was able to raise $10,000. This last year, students raised $4,100 from the event alone, and the donations came almost entirely from students contributing their own savings for a chance to break a rule.
Putting it together isn’t easy, though. “That was probably the hardest part about it, just planning it out,” says 12-year-old Cooper Heschuck, who is in Grade 7, also at Richard S. Fowler Catholic Junior High.
Then the group—40 students last year—breaks up into teams. Some help spread the word among the classes, raising awareness for the event and its underlying cause: the lack of clean water in communities around the world. Others come up with ideas for new rules they can sell, while a final team is responsible for collecting the funds raised and clean up.
Each year, the club tries to outdo itself by providing new rule-breaking opportunities. In addition to favourites like skipping homework, students have been allowed to take over their lessons and teach subjects they like or set up a tent in their class. One year, students even got to shave a teacher’s head.
The event is so popular that other schools in the district have taken up their versions of it, says Sawchuck. Yet it remains a unique part of the school and community calendar at the school.
“You think that it’s going to be chaos, but it’s not,” says Sherry Gagne, the school’s vice principal. “There’s just such a good spirit around it and [students and parents] know it’s for a good cause.”