Anahim Lake School has done it again.
For the second year in a row, the school of 37 students has garnered second place in Encorp’s Return-It School contest for the most amount of bottles recycled for a school with 150 students or less.
“We recycled 61,164 bottles which gave us $3,831.13,” principal Mike Brogan said, adding with the second place win, the school will receive a $750 prize.
With some of the money raised through the recycling program, the entire school and some of the parents went to Barkerville this week for a school trip.
“We’re using a district school bus, staying at the curling rink and we will be able to all go out for a couple of meals together,” Brogran said of the Barkerville trip. “Everyone is really excited.”
Brogan has been the principal since August 2014 and said everyone in the community now knows to save bottles for the school.
“We hold bottle drives every month or six weeks and put posters up ahead of time. Afterwards the students help sort the bottles.”
Some community members will drop bottles off at the school regularly as well, Brogran said.
“It’s neat to see all the kids K to 10 working hard, they’ve really bought into it,” he added.
This year Anahim Lake School was up against 47 other schools in its category, said Encorp program co-ordinator Chris Campbell.
Thetis Island Elementary garnered first place and Spring Creek Adventist Christian Church came in third.
“We had 231 schools in total registered in a handful of categories,” Campbell said.
To determine the winners, Encorp takes the total number of containers returned and divides it by the number of students.
In this year’s contest, almost 2.8 million containers were returned — 1,682,926 by elementary school students alone and another 1.1 million by high school students.
There is no cost to enter the program and one of the stipulations is that all the money from refunds goes back into the schools.
“The program really helps our school,” Brogan said. “We don’t have to charge students anything because we do all our own fundraising.”
