The Earth and Outing Club has been growing at Suffield High School and making multiple accomplishments along the way. The club has been at SHS for 12 years under the supervision of our advisor, Mr. Joseph Grimard. I’m a junior at SHS and have been the club secretary for a couple of months. It’s been great being a part of such an interesting club and appreciating the outdoors. The club has been a huge success with the estimated 15 students who show up weekly after school including the club president, Vincent Nguyen, and vice president, Javier Serrano.
Earth and Outing Club is for students who want to preserve nature while enjoying the beauty it has to offer. We’ve been going outside as much as possible, although it’s difficult in the winter. Even still, we plan to go skiing in the future and recently went ice skating. When we aren’t able to go outside, we learn survival and camping skills. For the past couple of weeks, we’ve been learning how to make multiple knots for when we travel or get certified in climbing. We have also learned how to start fires outside without matches. We hope to put these skills to use when we have a camping trip – such as the annual summer trip. If everything works out for this summer, we’d like to visit the Grand Canyon.
From November 9, 2021 – November 23, 2021, we had a Thanksgiving fundraiser called “Stuff Your Teacher.” We made large paper turkeys and suggested students buy them and hang them up on their favorite teacher’s door. The teacher with the most turkeys got to donate 15% of the club’s earnings to any organization they would like. Our winning teacher, Mrs. Fortin, donated her money to St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. In second place with 10% of our earnings, Mr. Janick donated to SHS club “Voices United.” In third with 5% of our earnings, Mrs. Price generously donated back to our club. In total, the fundraiser made $834.75, beating previous records for this fundraiser.
The earned money will go to the chosen organizations and the remainder will go back to our club’s excursions and needed materials. Our other fundraisers were movie nights which successfully took place at the high school. For Halloween we showed Coraline and for Christmas we showed Elf. All movies are family friendly and everyone is welcome. The admission is free and concessions are offered. We hope to get the word out more in the future to bring in more groups from the Suffield community for our next movie. We’d like to thank everyone who donated to the Stuff Your Teacher fundraiser or came to our movie nights. It’s wonderful that our club is able to succeed because of you.