Community members from both beach and town, in concert with dozens of students, parents, and teachers pitched in during community day to beautify and refurbish the Nosara High School, on Friday October 5th.
Almost a hundred volunteers, armed with enthusiasm and donated materials from Lagarta Lodge Hotel and Surfing Nosara Foundation scraped, sawed, sanded, scrubbed and stained many of the visible surfaces of the high school.
“Since 2010 we've been helping the schools to become part of the Blue Flag Ecological Program,” said organizer Jessica Sheffield Zamora. “After working with Del Mar Academy for the past five years to bring them into the program, we put the same thing in place to help the Nosara High School have a chance to get one as well. We achieved so much there (Del Mar Academy), so why keep it to ourselves?”
Information Technology professor Elvis Hernandez Rojas confirmed the desire on the school's side to organize and become part of the program.
“We've been attending several meetings over the past year,” he said. “There are many things to do, and in many different parts. We started with to give maintenance to the bathrooms, but since we had extra paint, we decided to paint the whole school!”
Amongst the painting, refinishing, and improvements to the bathrooms, there were also dozens of students helping to paint used tires to use as planters instead of becoming relegated to the dump. Within many of those tires, volunteers planted flowers, bushes, and fruit-bearing trees. |
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However, there are still other outstanding concerns and criteria before the school would be able to achieve the coveted “Blue Flag” designation.
“There's always a lot of stuff left to do,” said Sheffield. “We've also donated bins for compostable items, but we need to increase environmental education, and they need infrastructure. A key issue here is water quality, and you need that to make a better school.”
“But this...” Jessica said with a pause. “It's the highlight, it's when everyone gets together to improve their own school, when everyone chips in.”
| The Blue Flag Ecological Program was created in 1996 to promote sustainable cultures through a cooperation of several government departments, including, but not exclusively: MINAE, AyA (Water and Aquifer), the ministries of education, health, and social services. The program sets out criteria which communities must meet in order to get in and keep the flag. |
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