Reconciliation In Action

The students in Agnes Garrioch's Grade 7 class at St. Mary's School in Estevan wanted to raise awareness of Orange Shirt Day's meaning and purpose. That project was a photo essay that has been entered into a national contest.  

You can see the entire essay, titled "Every Child Matters" online. Here are a couple of the images.

Every student had an integral role in our Orange Shirt Day project planning committee. We would have frequent committee team meetings to help monitor our progress and to keep one another updated. Communications officers, documentarians, writers, logistics, and graphic designers were some of the roles in our committee teams. Together, all of these groups completed different tasks and worked hard to make the day a success. After organizing most aspects of our event, we invited the grade 8 class to join us as we embarked on this project! We showed leadership in our school community by both including and sharing our learning with them on our mission.

We bought a variety of orange coloured items we could find; candles, flowers and candies to name a few. These items would be gifts to those we met in the community and helped us initiate conversation with the public. We  took a school bus around the community and had designated stops where we would meet with any Estevan community members that happened to be there. We had partners we would stick with while we talked to people. We would give those we met an orange coloured gift and start the conversation about Orange Shirt Day. From there we would ask if they knew why orange shirt day is important, and that would turn into a discussion. We also handed them a fact about residential schools as well. After each stop we would have a round circle outside the bus or on the bus and share our stories with one another.

Every student got the chance to talk to someone about it and give away an orange item. We were able to go to go to City Hall and meet the mayor of our city and discuss with him our intentions and hopes for the day.  All the students got bussed around the city. We went to a bunch of local businesses and even the mayor’s office. We all talked to our mayor and told him what we were doing. Other locations we stopped at were our local police station, RCMP, leisure center, hospital, and to local businesses. A couple grade 7’s also spoke on the local radio station that day too, to describe our mission!

The local newspaper did an article about their work.