Crescent Elementary School receives ‘Green Gift’ from local business

Karen Buck, Rhinelander Cellcom store manager, right, recently presented a $1,200 donation to teaching assistant and master gardener Darleen Dronchi-Teminell, Crescent Elementary principal Gayle Daniel, and president of Master Gardners of Oneida County, Tom Jerow.

Posted Friday, October 27, 2017 8:38 am

STAR JOURNAL REPORT

Crescent Elementary School has been selected as a 2017 Cellcom Green Gift recipient, entitling the school to a $1,200 donation to expand its school garden.

“Our mission is to teach children to sustain the earth and themselves,” said Crescent principal Gayle Daniel. “They learn to sow and harvest quality foods for healthy consumption, thus promoting the saving our planet and their bodies. Our school garden has been slowly expanding over the last two years. Each year we want to continue introducing more children to a variety of gardening techniques which they can successfully replicate at their homes.”

The Green Gift will fund the addition of 10 earth boxes so each class can maintain its own garden, along with additional plants and materials for planting. In addition to sustainable gardening and health lessons, the school garden allows teachers to connect multiple science standards to various learning units, including plant growth, nutrition, comparing of plant to animal cells and more. There are also some beneficial life lessons in the process.

“Because this is a school garden, we also discuss the importance of everyone taking time to help with the chores as it benefits all students,” Daniel said. “Last year a few of the Oneida County Master Gardeners came to our school to volunteer time with our students. This community connection, between the youngest in the community and the adults, is something that we cannot teach in school. It must be experienced and it has and we hope it will continue for many, many years.”

Crescent was among 30 green organizations that received a share of the $40,000 in Green Gifts from Cellcom this year. The Green Gifts program launched in 2010 and uses funds generated from Cellcom’s cell phone recycling program to fund green nonprofit initiatives. Customers and community members can bring in their old or unwanted phones to be reused and recycled. The phones are sent to recyclers who in return send money to the company for the materials that were saved from the phones.

According to a company release, Cellcom's recycling program has generated $306,975 for local charities over the past 13 years.