Senior Cleaners: Doing Their Part

Seniors doing work for the community. Photos by Colton Sierra '14. Copyright Red Cloud Indian School.

Senior Cleaners: Doing Their Part

By Colton Sierra ‘14

May Day, Thursday the 1st, was the day the seniors embarked on a journey for good rather than evil. After school, all of the seniors made their way to “Yo Park” for their Senior Service Project.

Yo Park is the home of many summer basketball games and other summer activities, and it is also victim of a harsh, trashy abuse. Spiritual Formation teacher Garrett Waters is a Yo Park enthusiast, and he describes the park as “a beautiful space.” He also described it as being “healthy for the community.” Yo Park became the best place to start since it was so central to Pine Ridge.

Waters hopes that it will encourage others who see the park in its new glory to keep it clean. There were plenty of drivers who honked and showed gratitude whenever they drove by and saw a class of 40 students doing the simple job of cleaning. People asked about what was going on and were pleased to hear the news.

There were speculations of the park getting just as dirty as it was before a day after cleaning. This discouraged students before they went aboard the bus to the clean up site. The cleaning had somewhat of a slow start, but surely picked up with impressive speed. The chaperones had to make two trips to retrieve more trash bags. The seniors filled a striking 100 bags of trash and left Yo Park looking nearly brand new.

Apart from picking up trash, a few hand-picked seniors were chosen to get rid of the graffiti on the skate park. Some graffiti was left because it had no negative background, and some of it was transformed to look positive.

Overall it was a good experience for all of the seniors, and it was a good way to get all of the seniors together to ultimately enjoy their time together.

Waters explained that this trip was more so about the experience, and the teaching that “if you put in the effort in a united fashion, you can get things done.” Even though the Yo Park clean up was a small scale project, Waters will be in the works this coming summer thinking about how to make an impact on a larger scale.