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Goodbye, Great Green Help

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Written by alex santos

Seniors will remember that Great Green Help last year as a huge success: fun for students and beneficial for the non-profits and parks involved. It was an educational experience of community service as well as a day full of jokes, laughter and memorable stories. This article was supposed to be about the rumored triumphant return of Great Green Help. This “triumphant return” turned out to be no more than a triumphant rumor, one which sent this reporter following the trail of Great Green Help’s demise.

Background: Great Green Help was started as an Eco-friendly community service day for parks and non-profits in Lawrence several years ago. It was for juniors only, on the same day as Senior Appreciation Day, so more than half the school was usually gone.

Parks were cleaned and other areas were spruced up. Students went to various elementary schools and helped teach, clean up or play with the kids. At the Humane Society, volunteers played with dogs and cats and improved the garden . Students spent the day with residents of local retirement homes. Costumes at local theaters were cleaned and organized. These and numerous other things the juniors of Great Green Help accomplished for the community throughout the years.

But now back to the trail. It starts with Student Council. In previous years, they have successfully organized the event.

“In StuCo [Jason] Springer said we didn’t have time for it because of Homestretch and so we didn’t do it,” StuCo member Erin Ice said. “He told us he would hand it off to [Andrew] Nussbaum, and service learning but apparently Nussbaum never got officially asked.

“There is an assumption that service learning would do it but service learning is like Great Green Help everyday,” Jason Nussbaum said.

Junior Student Council members Kelcy Bowers and Hayley Francis did try to take matters into their own hands and visited principal Ed West in an effort to revive Great Green Help.

“For Student Council to take on new projects, they have to give some things up and Great Green help was one of them,” West said. “My comment to the juniors who wanted to bring it back was if they could find an adult sponsor to work with them and order the buses and do all that kind of stuff they could do it, but I haven’t heard from them since.”

Ice believed Bowers and Francis were going to speak to FYI sponsor Peggy Nelson but according to Nelson, no one officially approached her on the subject. However, she is uncertain if FYI could pull something together by April 30 with the other projects they are involved in.

“It’s in two weeks now and we really haven’t done anything with it lately because we were just waiting for Haley and Kelcy to like start us up on it. They were going to get contacts from Nussbaum, but I don’t know if it’s going to happen now,” Ice said.

The juniors did get contacts and numbers to call but had trouble getting a sponsor for Great Green Help.

“We were going to ask [Peggy] Nelson but she is really hard to get in contact with,” Bowers said. “She was gone for the three days we tried, and we got numbers of businesses and places to call, but it just never got off the ground. We thought we would be able to get it done on our own but we have so much stuff going on we can’t do it just by ourselves.”

StuCo removed Great Green Help from their agenda in an effort to make room for new projects, and the attempt to bring it back with another sponsor failed somewhat miserably. Teachers and students are saddened by the loss of this tradition.

“I feel bad about it ” junior Michele Schieffer said. “It sounded fun”

Amidst all the confusion about what was going to happen, there was still a small hope that Great Green Help would be held this year, at least on a much smaller scale but…

“There will not be a Great Green help this year,” assistant principal Lisa Boyd said in a recent e-mail to teachers.

Here is where the trail goes cold and the story ends- for now. Perhaps the next group of juniors will work hard to bring Great Green Help back from the dead for a day out in the warm sunny weather helping the community…and getting out of school.