TREE LOVE
Staff and students at Tignish Elementary School plant 28 trees
Students, staff and guests celebrate planting of 28 trees at Tignish Elementary School.
There was more than summer vacation to celebrate at Tignish Elementary School on the final day of the 2016-17 school year.
Students, staff and special guests gathered to celebrate the planting of 28 trees on the school grounds.
The Canada 150 tree-planting was funded by Tree Canada, the federal government and CN Rail through a project initiated by the Town of Tignish and its Communities in Bloom committee in partnership with the elementary school.
“It will make your property a lot more attractive over the coming years,” said Egmont MP Bobby Morrissey, one of the guests invited to the event.
There is also a safety component to the project. When students return to classes in September, each of the school’s classes will be assigned one tree, and it is there that they will gather during fire drills or emergency evacuations.
“I think being able to celebrate Canada’s ecological heritage is really cool,” said Megan Quinn, Tree Canada’s
program director for its Canada 150 program.
Tree Canada is Canada’s largest non-profit tree-planting organization, Quinn said, reporting that the organization has planted over 18 million trees since 1992. “You’re adding to that number,” she advised the students.
Principal Mike Ellsworth turned the ceremony into his students’ final teaching moment of the school year, explaining trees’ uses for food, shelter and aesthetic purposes, and the role they play in filtering out air pollution. “Look how much more beautiful it is here,” he observed
In addition to the 28 trees obtained through a $4,950 Tree Canada grant and panted by the Communities in Bloom and Home and School committees and the school’s graduating students, there was a special ceremony to mark the planting of a “Vimy” oak, a direct descendent from acorns scooped from the Vimy battlefields 100 years ago.
“Our hope and dream,” Ellsworth told the students, “is that someday when you’re driving by here you will look over and see all of the beautiful trees and you will remember this day as Canada’s 150th.”