By DAVID VITRANO
L’OBSERVATEUR

GRAMERCY—The students at Gramercy Elementary School had something special to celebrate on Earth Day.

Thanks to a $7,190 donation from Cargill, which operates a grain elevator in Reserve, the school was unveiling its new outdoor garden.

After Principal Kay Dornier introduced the handful of Cargill employees present for the opening, each grade thanked the corporation with handmade banners, signs and cards as well as a variety of chants and cheers expressing their gratitude.

The initiative is something Dornier has been pushing for since she came to the school three years ago. In fact, the dedication was supposed to take place last fall, but a pair of hurricanes pushed the ceremony back to the spring. Besides, Earth Day seemed an appropriate time for the dedication, said Dornier.

“It’s a different way of learning,” she said of the outdoor area, which presently holds various flowers and a couple of varieties of orange trees.

According to Dornier, the outdoor classroom gives students the chance for hand-on learning, and not just in growing a variety of flora. The garden presents numerous less obvious opportunities for education. The students can apply science and math knowledge in measuring growth and using the weather gauges. They can even develop their writing skills by jotting down observations as they sit on the benches that are part of the classroom.

Future plans for the outdoor classroom include more trees and a composting project. That compost will be used to fertilize grade-level fall gardens, which in turn will produce vegetables the students will sell to raise money for both the school and the local St. Vincent DePaul charity.

Also, according to Dornier, there are plans to extend the cafetorium to include a small zoo that will house turtles, hamsters, birds, salamanders and other small animals.

The entire project, which is part of Cargill’s “Earth Day, every day” campaign, came about because the parent of a GES preschooler is a local Cargill employee.

“It just all fell in place,” said Cargill Community Involvement Committee Chair Vicky Heltz.

According to Cargill Representative John Foy, Cargill has focused on the local schoolchildren because they are “our future.”

Theirs were not the only eyes focused on the future that day, either. As the GES chorus sang in their Earth Day-themed song, “We must make the future better than the past.”