The faculty, students and I hope you have realized that this week has been Earth Week! With our busy adult schedules it may have been possible to forget that fact. But as your students will tell you, it's important to take note. In fact, this week has been a good learning opportunity for our students to reflect on the meaning of sustainability and what innovation and collaboration, two Burgundy core values, can bring to our efforts to sustain our planet.

This week buddy classes collaborated on a variety of campus projects, from planting to picking up trash. On Wednesday the entire student body gathered in the Amphitheater and shared songs and original poems with sustainability themes. And on the whole, teachers and students tried to raise awareness of how we can reduce, reuse and recycle to care for our Earth.

Here is some commentary from seventh-grader and Epic Sustainability Task Force member Kevin Cafeo about what took place at school this week:

As a school we have accomplished many environmental and sustainable things this week. In the 7th Grade, we worked with our buddies, the 2/3 Buckeyes, on many different activities, including planting vegetables on the Middle School deck and informing the school about composting.

Earlier this week, a number of the Middle School students who are on the Epic Sustainability Task Force went to the annual Sustainability Conference at Saint Stephen's & Saint Agnes School. At the conference, a public school teacher from the Bronx, New York, shared a keynote presentation on The Green Bronx Machine. His class developed an amazing technology that made it possible to grow plants on a wall! His class redesigned the whole main street in the Bronx and re-built the street into a new, beautiful, healthy garden and workplace.

Learning about this project made me realize that anything is possible. Even if you start out with very little, you can make that into something that will affect the lives of millions of people. This year during Earth Week we have accomplished so much that will affect the lives of current and future Burgundy students.