St. Albert and Sturgeon County students went pink Wednesday as part of a nationwide stand against bullying.
Wednesday was Pink Shirt Day in Canada – a national campaign that has students and adults wear pink shirts to raise awareness about bullying.
Albert Lacombe was one of many St. Albert and Sturgeon County schools to celebrate the day.
Pink Shirt Day started in 2007 when two Nova Scotian high-schoolers rallied hundreds of students to wear pink shirts to show solidarity with a boy who had been bullied for wearing pink.
Bullying is in every school and every neighbourhood, and happens to both kids and adults, says Albert Lacombe principal Joan Tod. Nowadays, with social media, you don’t even have to speak to someone to bully them.
About 240 Albert Lacombe students wore pink Wednesday to speak out against bullying. Students put on anti-bullying skits, wrote and recited an anti-bullying oath, and heard an inspirational talk from local sports academy coach and former Pittsburgh Penguins player Rob Brown.
“Has anyone here ever been bullied?” he asks, speaking to the students.
Almost everyone raises a hand.
“Has anybody in here ever bullied somebody?”
Only two hands go up.
Many of us bully others without realizing it, Brown says. It can be as simple as spreading rumours about someone or excluding someone from a game.
“A lot of the people in here who have been bullied? You’ve probably bullied someone as well.”
He urged students to treat others as “teammates” and stand up for them in the face of bullying.
That goes for adults as well, Tod says. “If you don’t speak up and advocate for your child … the message you’re giving them is that (bullying) is something they have to accept.”
An Edmonton bakery has a new hit sandwich on its menu thanks to the bacon-prowess of Bellerose Composite students.
Edmonton’s Duchess Bake Shop unveiled a new feature sandwich last week that features bacon made by the Bellerose Business Venture group.
The Bellerose Business Venture is a student-run company at Bellerose Composite that puts on for-profit community dinners in St. Albert.
This is the group’s first commercial contract outside of the school, says Jason Dabbagh, the group’s teacher advisor. “They’ve ordered close to 50 pounds of our in-house cured bacon.”
Staff members at Duchess (some of whom have been guest speakers for the team) sampled the group’s bacon at a community dinner last November, Dabbagh said. That prompted the store to buy more of it.
This bacon was hand-made from premium pork supplied by D’Arcy’s Meat Market, Dabbagh says. Students cured the pork with a mix of salts and maple syrup (giving it a sweet flavour) before treating it with apple-wood smoke produced by the school’s new meat smokers.
The bacon sold for about $370 total, Dabbagh says. That’s about twice what you’d pay for store-bought bacon, but it has a much different flavour.
Duchess Bake Shop is now using the bacon in a BLT sandwich with Borgonzola cheese and a mushroom duxelle.
The sandwich has proven so popular that the shop ran out of bacon by Tuesday and was waiting for more from Bellerose, says shop co-owner Garner Beggs.
“I tried it for the first time today, and I was very impressed. It’s delicious bacon.”
The shop plans to keep the BLT on its menu for about a month, Beggs says. They also hope to ink future deals with Bellerose.
Dabbagh says he’s not sure what deal the students will come up with next, but suggests it might not be bacon-related – it’s a high-work, low-profit meat. “We might try to find something different to make money on.”
Visit bellerosebusinessventure.ca for more on the group.
