For the 2010-11 school year, the peace committee students chose Nutrition as their focus. Our goal was to explore and promote healthy nutrition in our own lives, in our school, in our community and in our world. We accomplished the following:
• Provided Leadership training to 6 middle school students,
• Enrolled 30 students in our weekly afterschool peace program
• Organized a family Harvest for Health Dance
• Collected Healthy Food for Tacoma’s Food Connection
• Designed and implemented and International Peace Day Assembly and rededicated ourselves as an International Peace Site,
• Bagged up over 2000 individual servings of a protein mix for the Food Connections Back Pack Program
• Provided an after school class on non-violent communication training to the students in the peace committee
• Produced and sold a Bryant Community Healthy Kids Cookbook
• Promoted healthy snacks in our school and at school events
• Raised over $1400.00 for Heifer Projects, enabling us to purchase a cow, a water buffalo, a pig, a goat, 2 sheep, 3 flocks of chicks, 2 flocks of geese, 2 flocks of ducks, 3 bee hives and a set of trees to help families in Africa.
• Promoted the Be the Spark: Desmond Tutu event at the Tacoma Dome, providing 66 scholarship tickets, 2 free buses, 60 t-shirts and free pizza to the 120 people from the Bryant community who participated in the event.
• Organized and Implemented an Earth Day Garden Fair and Parade of the Species in which we had 60 activity, information and vendor tables and over 1500 people attended.
• Purchased and Painted 4 more rain barrels on our school.
Tag Archives: International Peace Site
Bryant Peace Committee
Our Peace program was started as the result of a Disco Party for Peace that was the dream of 8 year old, Sam. In 2007, Sam had his Disco Party and raised over $15,000.00 for children affected by war in Iraq, Sudan and Liberia, and to provide peace education materials for his own school, Bryant Montessori. A Peace Committee was formed in 2008 and students, parents and staff worked together to create a peace program at Bryant.
We kick off each year by rededicating ourselves as an International Peace Site at an assembly the peace committee creates for the International Day of Peace on September 21st. As a Peace Site we commit to the following:
Protect the environment;
Promote intercultural understanding and
Celebrate diversity;
Seek peace within ourselves and others;
Reach out in service, and
Be responsible citizens of the world.
At the assembly, each child creates a written or drawn expression of their commitment to be a peaceful citizen, and each classroom creates a peace pledge, which every child in the classroom signs and then 1 or 2 students present their classrooms pledge to the school at the assembly. Afterwards, the pledge is installed in their classroom. This has been a great way to begin our year and to clearly set our intention and rededicate ourselves as an International Peace Site.
Each year our students choose a focus topic and a continent which we then introduce at the Peace Assembly. We create our program around that focus and implement the focus topic on a personal, school-wide, community and global level. One of our goals is to choose a topic that our students may take for granted, like education and then create the opportunities to learn about the privilege and gift it really is and how the topic relates to peace.
Bryant Peace Committee 2008-09 Education
During the 2008-09 school year as we began our program our focus was on Peace through Education. We accomplished the following:
• We landscaped the front of our school to create a peace garden,
• Peace Banners were created that hang from the ceiling and go down our main hallway by our pre-k and kindergarten children
• We dedicated ourselves as Tacoma’s first International Peace Site.
• We created a peace pole for our peace garden that stands over 6 feet tall and says, “May Peace Prevail on Earth” in 12 languages. The languages represent the heritage of the children in our school and the children in our neighborhood,
• We created an assembly for World Peace Day that has become an annual ritual. It is held each year on or around Sept. 21st.
• Each house created a banner to represent one of our values as a peace site. The banners represent Love, To Protect the Environment, To Promote Cultural Understanding, and to Seek peace within ourselves and others, These banners lead the peace parade at our dedication and now hang in our peace garden.
• We started an after school peace committee program for students
• At the urging of 10 year old, Nurhan, we started a Pennies for Peace Campaign and raised $9,000.00 to build a school in Afghanistan by collecting pennies.