Link Elementary Students and Parents Help Clean Up Rockland

Last weekend, Kathlen Shankar was playing with her children at Link Elementary School in New City when she noticed that there was garbage on the ground in the back field. Shankar had heard about an upcoming clean-up event at Link, but only after seeing firsthand the work that needed to be done did she take herself and her two children to help out.

“Once I realized that it needed to be cleaned up, we might as well get our children involved,” Shankar said. “[…] I hope that they realize that there’s things that don’t biodegrade and should really be thrown in the trash rather than on the ground. At the rate that we go we need to really save the planet for them.”

That event was the Great American Clean-Up, held in several places throughout Rockland on Saturday, including Link Elementary. The program invited Link students and their parents to pick up trash and weeds on the school grounds and the surrounding areas on Red Hill Road.

The Great American Clean-Up runs in Rockland from April 9 to April 24 and is Rockland’s largest yearly community improvement event. Teams sign up to clean up a particular site, and they are provided with trash bags and litter pickers to make the job easier. The program is in collaboration with Keep Rockland Beautiful, an affiliate of the national organization Keep America Beautiful. Keep Rockland Beautiful aims to encourage volunteers to clean up and beautify areas throughout the county. Last year the clean-up bagged over 40 tons of trash, according to the Keep Rockland Beautiful website.

Shankar even invited her brother to come from Connecticut to help out with the clean-up. Matt Rutherford made the hour-plus trip to Rockland for the event.

“It’s just a good opportunity to do a little bit and hang out with my nephews,” Rutherford said. “I felt like it’s kind of the responsibility of everybody to do at least a little bit when they can. […] It’s just a good experience for my nephews too.”

Also attending the clean-up was Christopher Williams, who came with his daughter Mikaela, who is in kindergarten, and his son Eddie, who currently attends Felix Festa Middle School in West Nyack. He has done the Great American Clean-Up in the past with a Cub Scout troop he used to volunteer with. His son is currently in Boy Scouts and this past fall helped build an outdoor classroom for the school that was one of the main cleaning areas for Saturday’s event.

“I think it’s important for the kids to grow and appreciate the outdoors, so I wake them up early on  Saturday morning, come out here and clean up for a couple hours,” Williams said.

Like Williams, Galit Maayani also has her own scout troop that has done events like these in the past. Maayani came to Link on Saturday with her daughters Maya and Liran along with their friend Ilyssa Milich. Maayani also recently volunteered at Link’s Earth B.E.A.T. Day. B.E.A.T stands for “Basic Environmental Awareness Training” and provides different stations to teach children about various environmental issues, including recycling, saving water, and buying local groceries. Maayani also will be volunteering at an Earth B.E.A.T event in Garnerville later this year.

“A dirty environment in which they [kids] live is not a place that they would want to live in, and it would just be nice for them to clean even though it’s after other people that are dirty,” Maayani said. “They should see how bad it is and not do it themselves also.”

Indeed, while this is the first time Link is participating in the Great American Clean-Up, the school has been helping out with the environment in other ways for many years. In the past, students have taken paper bags from local businesses and decorated them with Earth Day messages to help spread the work. Link also has a program where older students read stories with environmental messages to the younger students in the school read to other kids about environmental stories. Students in the school also do projects where they help the Earth in various ways and then write about what they did. These writings are then hung throughout the school. In fact Link has a special “Green Team”, a committee of teachers and parents that help organize these different events and activities.

One member of the “Green Team” is Christina Paul, teacher for the honors program Dimensions and also coordinator for the International Baccalaureate Primary Years Program at the school.

“Our school in general is very much involved in the environment, “ she said. “[…] We’re an international school, so we try to do our part, and we’re always very big into the environment. We’ve got a lot of events going out this month for environmental awareness, and this was just another thing to do.”

In fact the school is so involved in the environment that some students were excited to join in the cleaning process. Ellen Moore noted that her fifth-grade daughter Carli found out about the clean-up day at school and came home that day asking if they could participate.

“We got to teach the kids to take care of our planet, otherwise there won’t be much left,” the elder Moore sad. “So it’s just part of our job, like everything else. Take care of each other, take care of the planet.”

And for Christina Paul the main goal of the day was not just helping to clean up her school but also to help spread the idea of protecting the environment throughout the community.

“The major thing [is] clean up the grounds, make it really safe or the kids, and then just hopefully it will spread further around the community, and if they see a whole school coming together and doing it more people will get out in the community and do it as well.”