A fully-functional kitchen is being assembled piece-by-piece in an old science lab of Port Elgin Regional School.
Educational Assistant Chris Morrison, along with a small team of fellow staff, have been holding raffle after raffle to help fund the construction of the kitchen.
Morrison also procured a number of grants for the project, including $7,000 from the New Brunswick Children’s Foundation just two days ago.
The kitchen is part of a multi-faceted, hands-on learning experience to teach students about food, commerce, and the environment.
“Our kitchen is going to be a fully-functional kitchen so that during the course of the day, there will likely be a schedule for classroom visits to go in,” explains Morrison. “If you want to prepare a crock pot with produce that we’ve carried out from the garden… something along that line. It will teach them some good life skills as well. So many of our kids don’t have gardens at home.”
Port Elgin Regional also has a four-season greenhouse built, ready to grow vegetables for the school cafeteria program.
Principal Christoph Becker says growing their own produce will lower cafeteria prices, which should help lower-income and food insecure students.
“I envision this as a place where after school, children have a place to go,” says Becker. “We want to place for them to be after school [where] they can learn, and I hope that we’ll find partners that will run a program after school for kids in our kitchen.”
The school has received a number of donated kitchen supplies, but is sparing no cost when it comes to larger appliances.
“We’re very eco-friendly school,” explains Becker. “I hate to see appliances leaving here after five to ten years. These are made to last, right? So we’re going to pay that little extra so that we are stewards of the environment.”
This environmental consciousness is being taught to their students, in a hands-on, fully engaged way.
“Our school is going down this environmental path,” says Becker. We want to do inquiry based learning, experiential learning where kids are hands on and learning in a way that matters to them, not just receiving passively. That’s why all these initiatives are so important to us. The way that we do things is changing at Port Elgin, it can no longer be the teacher delivering knowledge and they regurgitate it back, they have to be part of the process. They have to understand and research and do things. We feel that is a better model, because disengagement in education is high provincially, and in our school, and we want to address that.”
Fundraising is still underway. Classes are even competing with each other, since the class with the highest tickets sold gets a party.
Chris Morrison says there is another raffle on June 11th, with the chance to win lawn furniture, barbecues, staycations, and other prizes.
Tickets are $10 each and can be purchased by e-transfer at rafflepers@gmail.com, or by contacting the school.
Anyone with kitchen supplies they would like to donate should call the school at (506) 538-2121.
