Editor’s Note: Students in LaDericka Sewell’s eighth-grade class at Houlton High School were given an assignment last fall to write Letters to the Editor based on their experience of collecting trash in Houlton.
Dear Editor,
The kids in Mrs. Sewell’s eighth grade English class were given a pair of rubber gloves and a garage bag Thursday, Oct. 6, 2011. With those items given they went outside and spent their class time cleaning up certain spots of our community. Some students carried some very unique items out of the woods. A couple of girls lugged an old beat up hood to a derby car all the way out of the woods to a dumpster they have around the back of the school. The students were able to pick a group of four that they could be in and after that they started their mission around the community for trash.
On Wednesday, Oct. 5, we came up with a list of rules we had to follow while outside. The rules consisted of participating, staying with the group, listening to the teacher, and much more. We worked together and had garbage bags full to the top with trash. Some student’s bags were even tearing because they were so full! The eighth grade class can clean up garbage around the town of Houlton and so can you! All they had was a pair of gloves and a garbage bag. You have to admit that’s not a lot you need, but it is a lot you are doing for the community!
You want to have a clean place for your kids to run and play, right? Well, all that takes is throwing away your trash after you’re done with it, simple, right? Now you may be asking if it’s so simple, why do people not do it? Well maybe they are too lazy to get up and find a trash bin; it’s as simple as that. They usually take for granted that there is a ground all around them, but what they don’t know is that destroys our beautiful world that we live in. So please, just throw away your trash! Trust me, it does make our community a better place!
There are so many differences you can make in our world, but the most important one is making our town and community beautiful. Any of you painters out there, well, just think it’s an art project that you have to paint. You could paint the town green by just making a difference and cleaning up some trash. Just stop and think for a second, all five classes from the eighth grade English class spent around 45 minutes outside and came up with a huge amount of trash! If you took a half hour to forty-five minutes of your day to pick up trash it would be an amazing improvement.
If you want to make a difference you will, because it’s just so easy! Most people don’t want to get away from their Facebook accounts or have too much homework, well there are seven days a week and there is probably twenty to thirty minutes that you have some free time that you could go outside and paint your town just a tint of green. It works trust me! Maybe you could have some friends help you, or maybe you could make up a contest to see who could get the most amount of trash; you could make a game out of it. It may not be something you would want to spend your free time doing, but if we changed the world now just look what it would look like in a few years. There are children born everyday somewhere in the world that will someday be playing around in a park or maybe even in their own back yard and not be safe and could easily get sick. And that’s the last thing I would want to be doing is watching a newborn baby sick from our community being dirty. So why don’t we all just take at least twenty to thirty minutes out of our day and change the world just a little bit. If eighth graders can do it, anyone can! Let’s work together and make a change in the world, a good change.
Mariah Boyd
Grade 8
Houlton Junior High School
