Students are pictured tying ribbons on the "Peace Pole" during the International Peace Day ceremony. View a photo gallery.

Sept. 19, 2008 - The Blue Creek Elementary School community celebrated International Peace Day recently by honoring its bus drivers and planting “Peace Pavers” bricks along the sidewalk in front of the school.

Peace Day is recognized worldwide each year on Sept. 21 as a day of global non-violence.

Students and teachers gathered in front of the school on a cool Friday morning to sing songs and tie ribbons to the school’s peace pole, which displays the word peace in four languages.

Blue Creek Principal Annette Trapini said the school’s Building Council choose to honor bus drivers to show students that the drivers are respected members of the school community, and that behaving during bus rides helps create a peaceful environment.

“Students don’t always understand that the bus ride to and from school each day is part of the school community,” Trapini said. “We felt it was important for us to help them understand why it is important to behave on the bus.”

Students made cards for the bus drivers and treated them to breakfast. After the ceremony students were grouped by bus routes and headed off to classrooms throughout the school to participate in activities. The goal was to start to develop a sense of community amongst the student on each bus and to help them to think about appropriate bus behavior. Activities included “trash and treasure,” which required students to write on a piece of paper something they had done that was not peaceful bus behavior. Students crumpled the inappropriate behavior description and threw it away. Students then wrote down peaceful choices they can make on the bus. These papers were labled “treasures” and will be on public display at Blue Creek.

 
Students also began planting bricks along the sidewalk in front of the school during the ceremony earlier in the day. The bricks were painted with different words of peace in different languages, said Maya Trawinski, Blue Creek’s art teacher.

“The students did a fantastic job painting the bricks,” Trawinski said.

Students began painting the bricks on the first day of school and had completed several hundred by the day of the ceremony. Some of the bricks will be placed in front of the school, while the rest will be placed in the back of the school bordering a “Peace Garden” that will be developed in the spring.