La Jolla's Gillispie School Launches First Annual Earth Week Celebration

The Week of April 17-21 will honor Mother Earth as students “Green Up Gillispie" during its first annual Earth Week celebration. The school will kick-off a week of service projects, lessons, assemblies and discussions designed to raise the students’ awareness of environmental issues and their responsibilities as citizens of our planet.

La Jolla, CA (PRWEB) April 3, 2006 -- According to the latest data from the Environmental Protection Agency, Californian’s breathe the nation’s most polluted air, boosting health risks and threatening our quality of life. (See http://www.epa.gov/ttn/atw/natamain/). This troubling news about their home state is not lost on students from La Jolla’s Gillispie School, who intend to make an environmental difference by launching the school’s first annual Earth Week.

Beginning Monday April 17th, the school will kick-off a week of projects, lessons, assemblies and discussions designed to raise the students’ awareness of environmental issues and their responsibilities as citizens of our planet. The following activities will unfold:

Monday, April 17th: Reuse and Recycle Day, designed to enhance students’ understanding of conservation, recycling, reuse in the classroom.

Tuesday, April 18th: Energy Reduction Day, which aims to increase awareness of energy conservation and alternative energy sources.

Wednesday, April 19th: Walk/Bike to School Day, during which families will reduce fossil fuels by walking or cycling to school.

Thursday, April 20th: Zero Trash Lunch Day, during which children and staff will bring their lunches in reusable materials in efforts to create no refuse at lunch time.

Friday, April 21st: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle Assembly Day, where children will demonstrate their knowledge of environmentally sound practices at a special assembly, led by Dr. Jacqueline Yarbrough, Head of School and Ms. Cathy Blake, Assistant Head of School.

Special events throughout the week will include a visit from the San Diego County Office of Education’s Green Machine, custom-decorated Earth Week shopping bags created by the students for Jonathan’s Market, demonstrations of solar cooking devices by the fourth grade class, recycled materials sorting races, special performances and many classroom-specific activities.

Spurred on by their personal passion for sustainability and environmental concern, parents, teachers and administrators joined together to plan and ultimately launch Earth Week. Says Ms. Kathy Harte, one of Gillispie’s greatly-respected and much-loved kindergarten teachers, “We want to teach our students to treasure their community and inspire them to preserve it daily. Celebrating Earth Week each year will assure that environmental awareness remains a priority at our school.”

Adds Dr. Yarbrough, “And one special week a year is just the beginning at Gillispie. We’ve instituted several long-term efforts toward achieving sustainability including a school compost bin, use of recycled materials and the study of solar energy. We want our students, faculty and families to ‘walk to the talk’ every day, not only in April.”

About The Gillispie School
The Gillispie School is a nonprofit independent school serving children from toddlers through sixth grade, located at 7380 Girard Avenue in La Jolla. Built upon a tradition of more than six decades of service to the children of La Jolla and the greater San Diego community, The Gillispie School’s programs for early childhood and elementary students have established the school as one of the city’s premier educational centers.

About Earth Day
April 22, 2006 marks the 36th anniversary of the first observance of Earth Day. The late U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-WI), Earth Day's co-founder, said he modeled Earth Day on anti-Vietnam War demonstrations called "teach-ins" that then were common on college campuses:

“I visited Santa Barbara in the summer of 1969 to speak at a water conference, and then flew north to Berkeley to speak at a conservation conference. On the plane I read an article about the use of campus anti-war teach-ins to educate students about the Vietnam War. Suddenly the idea occurred to me: Why not devote a day to a nationwide teach-in on the environment?

Thus was born Earth Day. Eight months later, on April 22, 1970, 20 million people, 2,000 colleges and universities, 10,000 grammar and high schools and 1,000 communities mobilized for the first nationwide demonstrations on environmental problems. Congress adjourned for the day so members could attend Earth Day events in their districts. The response was nothing short of remarkable, and the modern American environmental movement took off.

My major objective in planning Earth Day 1970 was to organize a nationwide public demonstration so large it would, finally, get the attention of the politicians and force the environmental issue into the political dialogue of the nation. It worked. By the sheer force of its collective action on that one day, the American public forever changed the political landscape respecting environmental issues.”

SOURCE: "A Brief History of Earth Day," by Gaylord Nelson (1989), entered into the Congressional Record on April 20, 1990 by Senator David Boren (D-OK)

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