Photo by Sarah Finnegan
Chelsea Park Elementary School students pull weeds and dead grass from dirt that will be used in a flower bed for the upcoming bicentennial celebration of Alabama. Chelsea Park is one of 200 schools designated as an Alabama Bicentennial School.
When the state of Alabama decided to commemorate 200 years of being part of the United States, state leaders knew they wanted to use the momentum to enact positive change for as long as possible. Instead of one year, Susan DuBose said, they set aside three.
“This started actually about two years out before the actual celebration began. … The idea was we would try to spend enough time that they could really acquaint the people of Alabama with the entire trajectory of their history,” said DuBose, who is the Alabama Bicentennial education coordinator.
Organizers gathered committees and began educating and giving materials to teachers to share with their students, from Alabama’s beginnings as Mississippi territory to statehood. DuBose said the program includes primary source educational development, particularly through archives, and professional development through camps with teachers.
Now, with the 2019 bicentennial year approaching, they are focusing on the third prong: the Alabama Bicentennial Schools chosen to give back to their Alabama community.
“After the bicentennial is over, we want students to be excited about their state,” DuBose said. “We want them to stay here, and we want them to grow up here. … That’s an important part of it.”
Last year, ALABAMA 2000, the three-year celebration of the people, places and events of the state’s history, sent a request out to every public, private, homeschool and charter school in the state, asking them to submit community service project proposals for ideas that would allow the schools to give back in different ways. Those chosen are named as Alabama Bicentennial Schools.
“We opened it K-12 and had some submissions that were just breathtaking,” DuBose said. “We ask communities to do a great deal for our schools, so this is a chance for them to give back to their community.”
Out of the 400 submitted proposals, committees chose the 200 schools that focused on projects involving civic engagement and ideas that would inspire stronger connections between community and school. They also gave out $500 grants for honorable mentions.
In the 280 corridor, Chelsea Middle School and Chelsea Park Elementary were among the 200 Alabama Bicentennial Schools. In August, both schools were honored in Montgomery, given banners to display and awarded a $2,000 grant to pursue their projects.
In August 2019, each school will present their project findings, and the top three in each congressional district will be chosen based on community engagement, effect of the community, lessons learned and whether the project is sustainable. Those chosen will be invited to be part of the “last big celebration” in Montgomery in December 2019, DuBose said. More details will be available closer to that date.
“One of the teachers who evaluated all the projects said this is just like planting kudzu, and she said the roots are deep and the spread is wide. … Birmingham was an area that blew us away by so many great projects,” DuBose said.
Photo by Sarah Finnegan
A Chelsea Park Elementary class utilizes the school’s outdoor classroom Sept. 19. The outdoor space plus beautifying projects and building several gardens were part of the school’s project to celebrate 200 years of Alabama statehood.
Chelsea Middle School Principal Caroline Obert said they chose a project that was important to the entire Chelsea community. She said the peer helpers of Chelsea Middle, with the help of history teacher Blake Lovett and media specialist Rebecca Rayl, will partner with the Chelsea Historical Society this school year to assist with needs they have for the Chelsea Historical Museum, which opened in 2018 in the Crane House.
Not only will the team work to get the house listed on the Alabama historical site registry, they will also work to transcribe an interview with the last known living Crane relative for the Historical Society’s archives, in addition to hosting both a spring and fall donation drive for specific items needed to showcase in the museum.
“Chelsea Middle and their community are going to work together to talk about the historical significance of the community through artifact drives for the Crane House,” DuBose said.
Because the city of Chelsea has been the largest growing city in the state for several years, Obert added, the students thought a focus on history was the way to go with the project proposal.
“We really felt like this was for a project that could not only reach people who have been here for many, many generations, but also the influx of new people who are coming to the city,” Obert said. “We felt like it would be a project that would bring together, essentially, ‘old’ Chelsea and ‘new’ Chelsea.”
Obert said she hopes the project helps the students learn what contributing to the community feels like, in addition to developing hometown pride for Chelsea.
Brooke Dunham, Chelsea Park Elementary music teacher and one of the bicentennial project leaders, said their community service project will focus on building an outdoor classroom, beautifying their school and working with the local farmers associations to teach fourth-graders about farming and agriculture by building a garden.
“The students will be the ones planting, and the teachers are the ones having science lessons around the planting and math lessons about measurements,” Dunham said, in addition to “character education lessons” related to cultivating leaders in the school.
After the students plant their first winter harvest in November, they will pick the tulips and herbs and sell the flowers for Valentine’s Day. The proceeds will go to a local food bank charity, Heavenly Smiles.
So far, Dunham said the students have been excited to play in the dirt and learn about gardening, and DuBose said it will be a way for students to learn about farming, biology, math, economics, marketing and civic responsibility.
“It just has the potential to really shore up another really important connection to connect to the community through the food bank,” DuBose said. “We have several schools that are doing food bank projects, and we think those have just a lot of power.”
Dunham said they were extremely honored to be chosen as a bicentennial school and hope to be chosen as one of the top schools in the district.
“As far as I know, we are the only state that has had three years to really think about where we’ve been and who we were and who we are now, and who we want to be in the future,” DuBose said, “and how we want our kids to grow up, and what we hope our state will offer to the future.”
To learn more, go to alabama200.org.
