College Park School’s Grade 7 has entered their composting program into a contest to win a trip to Kootenay National Park. 

Parks Canada has started Canada’s Coolest School Trip contest which promotes nature conservation in communities across the country. The College Park class started a composting program at the school. They are collecting all the composting material at the school and sending it to the city’s composting program.

Student Nabeel Malek says they’ve been learning about different ways of conserving nature in their classes and hopes the program will expand to other schools in the division. They are also looking to make compost bins for the neighborhood.

“A lot of our garbage goes to the landfill. If we did compost less of it would go there and more of it would be recycled and go into the earth.”

College Park is one of 28 schools in the contest all of which submitted a video showing how they are promoting conservation in their communities. The first stage of the contest is based on community support. People are able to vote once a day on their favourite entry and the top 10 most voted entries will go to a panel of judges.

If they win, the class will go on a five day trip to the Kootenays and visit the Burgess Shale, Radium Hot Springs and the Stanley Glacier. Teacher Cornelius Krahn says the students are going above and beyond to get support from the community.

“To help promote the contest, the students have created their own videos and Facebook posts. Each day on our social media platforms we will be encouraging people to vote because they can vote daily.”

He says the trip falls in line within the curriculum with students learning about resources and land formation in their social science courses.

“Visiting the national park is a great way to really solidify those classroom ideas that we’ve been talking about and really gets it into their heads about the importance of the environment and doing our part for the environment.”

Contest voting is now open and closes on March 20.