BELFAST (NEWS CENTER Maine) – “What are we doing here today? Keeping Belfast, Maine beautiful!”
Middle schoolers in Belfast walked out of school Tuesday afternoon, with their teachers and school administration, trading the classroom for the city streets.
They walked block by block downtown, picking up trash, and working to keep Belfast, Maine beautiful.
"What we were doing was cleaning up the trash around Maine, well, Belfast, and we're picking it up and we're trying to clean up,” says Troy A. Howard Middle School sixth-grader, Kylie Laite.
Organizers estimate there were over one-hundred students, and a dozen teachers and parents, decked out in bright orange t-shirts, who were involved in picking up trash on the streets of Belfast Tuesday. This afternoon clean-up is only the kick-off to a weeks’ worth of events in Belfast, aimed at beautifying the city.
"It really gives them a sense of pride in their community,” says Martha Conway-Cole, a social studies teacher at the middle school and an organizer of Tuesday’s clean-up. "It's really important that our city government and our schools linked together because that really gives the kids a sense of who in their community they know, [like] their police force."
"It's for a good cause,” says Laite. “I mean, every piece of plastic, every piece of trash, it's better than being in the ocean."
"We talked a bit about the watershed and how things go down stream into our Penobscot Bay,” added Conway-Cole. “So we decided to kind of walk downhill and pick up as we go, the same way that the water would pick up trash and wash it into our ocean."
"It's bad for like the animals that roam around like it could blow into like the ocean and the fish could die or choke,” says fellow sixth-grader Joseph Lemon. "I think people in Maine should stop just throwing it out the windows just because they don't want to get their vehicle all dirty or something."
"I'd be much happier if it was all clean instead of seeing trash every day,” added Laite.
Belfast Police Department Sgt. John Gibbs recalls a similar clean-up day when he was growing up in Monroe, which became the idea around this week’s events in Belfast.
"I think we made an impression on them,” says Sgt. Gibbs of the middle school students. “I think down the road that when they consider throwing some trash out somewhere that they might think twice about it because of their experience today and cleaning it up.
The week culminates in a community clean-up and bar-b-que in downtown Belfast on Saturday afternoon, May 12, 2018.