BEA students clean up their communities

Sarah Day — Staff Writer
BLUE EARTH — About 300 students were seen throughout the communities of Blue Earth, Winnebago, Frost, Delavan and near Bricelyn Wednesday.

All of the Blue Earth Area middle school students — grades 6, 7 and 8 — participated in the school’s community clean-up project throughout the day.

Sara Albright was one of the teachers instrumental in organizing the event.

Planning starts mid-year, and the project takes most of the year to get organized.

“We have to find enough jobs for 300 kids to do all day,” she explained.

Albright said the cities are supportive of the school district. The school also should open up to the communities and give something back.

This is the second year the whole middle school has participated, though community clean-up groups from the school did projects for many years prior.

Students in Blue Earth did things like cleaned up the Faribault County Fairgrounds by picking up sticks and leaves, cleaned the log cabin, planted flowers and picked up garbage. Students also cleaned alleys in town, planted flowers at parks and cleaned up Steinberg Park and the cemetery.

“It’s a lot of physical labor,” Albright said.

She said it was a good way for the students to gain life experience in volunteering.

To prepare for the day, she spoke to her students about community service and why it’s important.

“They know it’s just to help out the community,” she said. “It’s a good way for us to give back to (the community).”

Emily Hynes, Alex Chase and Daniel Krieger, all sixth-graders, thought the project was fun.

“It’s fun ’cause you don’t get any homework,” Krieger said.

“It’s fun, but it can be kind of harsh at times, while walking around in the mud,” Chase added.

Hynes said they found a large amount of garbage down by the river.

“It’s kind of sad to see all the garbage,” she said. “There’s a lot. ’Cause when you think about all the people throwing away these things and not recycling — it seems like a garbage dump.”

The students all said they saw the impact they were having on the community.

“We’re making it so Blue Earth is a better place,” Hynes said.

“Yep, and that’s one of the big things,” Chase added.

The day isn’t what they expected — it was better.

“We sort of thought it was going to be boring, but once we got here it got funner and funner,” he said. “And you get to be with your friends.”

Teacher and former Delavan Mayor Bob Hanson had several groups of students in Delavan on Wednesday. He said he’s had his classes do service projects there before, because when the school in town was open the community strongly supported it.

“It’s been a good day for our town,” he said.

He also saw this as an opportunity for communities to “see kids in a different light” and see the good things students do.

In Delavan, students cleaned up the city park, cleaned and oiled the statue, swept curbs, re-painted faded yellow curb sections, painted stop sign and street sign posts silver, painted white stripes on the curbs for diagonal parking and raked several elderly citizens’ yards. The group also was going to seal coat the benches at the gazebo, but the benches were too wet.

Teacher and coach Terry Barnes helped supervise students with projects in Winnebago.

The students helped with the baseball diamond, assisted at the water treatment plant and washed fire trucks, police cars and ambulances. They also cleaned up brush at Parker Oaks and helped plant flowers.

“We just gotta keep encouraging them,” Barnes said. “They do nice work when they can stay on task. They do it willingly. It’s a day out of school too.”