Welcome To The Environmental Club's Earth Day 2000 Page!

In March 1999 the Environmental Club decide that we would like to plant some trees in our school yard. The school yard already had about 25 trees, but it still could use more trees. School tree planting is probably the easiest major project you can do to help the environment other than organizing garbage pickups. Although most schools have an adequate number of trees in their yards and playgrounds it never hurts do go that extra mile. After all, in saving the environment every little bit counts!

We first asked our principal Mr. Brock for his permission to plant trees on the school grounds. He said "Yes! it sounded like a great opportunity". Although we would have liked to do everything by ourselves we decided it would be good to have an adult contact person. (If you want to do this too, you should ask an adult to help you like we did). We asked our teacher Mr. Peck to help us a little bit. We would do all the major work, but if we needed an adult we could talk to him. We asked several tree farms and nurseries in our area for free trees to plant at our school. Our 2nd phone call landed us at Belcroft Tree Farms, who readily agreed to help. We are indebted to their help and co-operation for making this project possible. If you are planting trees at your school most tree farms (or at least large ones) will give you a tree or two to plant because it is a community service to the schools.

Our project wasn't that easy. It was meant to be our Earth Day Project and that's what we think of it as, but in actuality the trees were not planted until the second last day of school on June 27th! Our project ran into trouble in the actual planting part. Part of the deal with Belcroft involved that we would pick up the trees. Nobody in our club or in the school board could or were willing to pick the trees up. We eventually made a deal with Belcroft that they would plant the trees for a small fee that the school board would pay. With the help of Mr. Peck and Mr. Brock we chose locations in the schoolyard for the trees to be planted in.We originally wanted to involve students from a range of grades in the actual planting. But with Belcroft planting them everything turned out fine in the end.

On the last day of school everyone was commenting on the two new trees that were now in the Bogart schoolyard. One was a 6 foot tall white pine. The other was a 6 foot tall Norway Spruce. We hope that they will grow to be very tall!

We would like to sincerely thank Belcroft Tree Farms, Bogart Public School, The York Region District School Board, Mr. Peck, Mr. Brock and everyone who made this project a success. We hope this inspires kids all around the world to plant trees in their school yards.