In the past two College Park Day events, I had the opportunity to organize a school poster contest involving the city’s 6 school students. The event turned out to be extremely successful with some 70 entries from the students.

A big part of that success is attributed to the principals and staff of our schools. They spent many hours guiding their students on the posters and going out extra miles in getting the information they need.

The title of this year’s poster contest was “My Home, My Community”. In our organizing committee, we wanted to excite our students about the city they call their home.

Just to give you an idea about how this contest helped to achieve that goal, here is an example of one poster, which was beautifully done by a student from Berwyn Christian School in north College Park. Here he presented what he likes and doesn’t like about the city. As can be seen in the  image above , this young College Parker likes shopping in the City (IKEA) and thinks traffic is a big problem .  It looks like he went out to different parts of the city and took pictures for his project.

A poster contest is a very small effort to instill a sense of  attachment with our city. I’m sure there are many other joint activities that can be done to make them active citizens of our community.

At the end, we all want them to become successful in pursuing their careers, but at the same time, we also want them to contribute back to the community where they were raised.