On May 3, École Deer Meadow School's gardening and landscaping class will be building a pergola on the school grounds, with help from the Rotary Club of Olds and others.
A pergola is a decorative outdoor structure. It features columns or posts that support a roof which consists of a grid of beams or rafters.
This structure, when completed, will be named Dot's Spot, in honour of Dot Negropontes, a former teacher, principal, Chinook’s Edge School Division official and Community Learning Campus executive director.
Negropontes passed away May 15, 2017. She was a driving force behind the creation of the CLC and EDMS. In fact, she was the first prinicipal of EDMS.
Dot's Spot is the brainchild of EDMS teacher Lori Clarke's gardening and landscaping academy. They've been planning it and fundraising for it for about three years now.
"We had decided that we wanted to build some sort of an outdoor learning opportunity for kids. A place that a teacher could take -- if she wanted to -- an entire classroom outside and teach a lesson outside. Or they could work outside or do their reading outside," Clarke says.
"I just discovered myself as a teacher over the years that September and May and June are really hard to have kids -- to have them focus inside the classroom at a desk.
"And so I thought, if we could just build something that the kids could use at recess and all the other times but it would be big enough that a teacher could have an entire class out there, that would just be perfect.
"We were initially building a gazebo but you know what? It was just too big a project, and we had to be able to meet the safety standards for both the Town of Olds and Chinook's Edge School Division when we're building on the school property."
So the gardening academy approached the Rotary Club of Olds. Rick Cowling of the club offered to build it with help from the academy and his fellow Rotarians.
"It's going to be 12 feet by 16 feet, a big rectangle. And it's going to have built-in bench seating all around three of the sides," Clarke says.
"And my landscaping group, after we have it built, will edge it with mulch and plants and trellises so that clematis can climb up over it. Hopefully in a couple of years it will all be shaded, too."
Clarke notes that the May 3 building date coincides with a district conference being hosted by the Rotary Club here in Olds.
"I'm really crossing my fingers for good weather. So that will certainly impact our day, because I've known it to snow on the first of May. But that's OK, I've whispered to the sunshine angels that I need them," Clarke says.
When completed, the pergola will have a sign denoting it as Dot's Spot. Later -- perhaps in the fall -- plans call for a giant rock to be placed there as well, with a sign sandblasted into it stating something like, "The Dot Negropontes Memorial Pergola."
It will be located in the southeast part of the school grounds, at the corner of 55th/54th Street and Balsam Crescent.
"It's a perfect spot for a couple of reasons," Clarke says.
"One, that's still a supervised area, so students can use it all throughout their recesses and noon hours and it's also a busy, well-lit corner, because we're aware of vandalism."
A landscaping project the academy undertook earlier at the school was vandalized. Their garden and climbing plants were destroyed.
"I shared with them Michelle Obama's quote, that 'when they go low, we go high.' And I said, we will replant," Clarke says.
"And that's what I said with this pergola. I said, 'anything that happens to it then we just fix it and go on.'"
Clarke says over three years, students managed to raise their share of the cost for the pergola: about $3,000.
Several local businesses have donated supplies for the project as well.
She says some time in late May or early June, an official opening of the pergola will be held, at which time all those who helped create it will be thanked, including past gardening and landscaping academy members who now go to Ecole Olds High School.
She figures over the past few years about 150 students have been involved in the project in one way or another.
Grade 8 student Taylor Kjargaard is one of the current gardening and landscape students and has been involved with the pergola project for a couple of years.
"I think that having a pergola inside the school -- or outside the school, I guess -- is a great idea because learning outside is a great idea for kids. Even just reading is just really nice, or at recess time," she says.
She says she's enjoyed working on the project because "I really like organizing things."
"Me and my friends, we've made multiple presentations to different clubs like the Rotary and the Lions about asking for donations and yeah, just general organization and stuff," she says.
