NEWS PHOTO JEREMY APPEL
The Centre for Academic and Personal Excellence charter school held the first winter holiday feast in its new building's gymnasium Thursday.
jappel@medicinehatnews.com@MHNJeremyAppel
The Centre for Academic and Personal Excellence has brought back its annual Holiday feast after it took a years-long hiatus due to a lack of space in its old building.
“This is the first time we will again eat together as a large group in 10 years, and you can feel the energy,” says CAPE principal Jeney Gordon.
As it does every year, the charter school also collected donations for the Medicine Hat Women’s Shelter Society in an initiative dubbed “Stack the Sleigh.”
Gordon says the charitable initiative originated years ago when a Grade 9 student “become aware of friends at our school and their families who were using the food bank.”
“He wanted to do something that was impactful and so his suggestion was the school collect items for charity, being the food bank and women’s shelter,” she recalls.
In addition to this donation drive, school administrators decided they wanted to bring some Holiday joy to their students as well.
“We wanted to celebrate community. We’re a K-9 school, we have a very diverse population and we wanted just to enjoy each other’s company,” Gordon said.
At the time, CAPE had just 120 students, so it was easy to fit the entire student body in the old gymnasium.
“As we grew, we grew out of the gym and we didn’t want to violate the fire code, so we moved into classrooms and then we started renting facilities,” said Gordon. “Short of renting the Cypress Centre, we could not accommodate our kids and families.”
While the feast took a hiatus, the school continued collecting donations, spreading it out to twice a year now – for the women’s shelter at Christmas and the food bank for Easter.
For the women’s shelter, Gordon says they raised enough items to fill up two vans, which were provided by CAPE community members based on a list the shelter provided.
The school’s 14 classes came up with about 100-200 items, she estimates.
The feast’s food was also provided by CAPE families, which is buttressed by funding from the school council to fill any gaps there might be to ensure they provide for students with special dietary needs, whether they’re gluten-free or are halal-observant, said Gordon.
“Whatever food is left over, we make sure it finds a home where it needs to be,” she said. “That’s one of the wonderful things. We have families who say, ‘I don’t want this back. Send it where it needs to be,’ so that makes the holidays for some of the families even better.”
She says the festivities fit well into CAPE’s mandate of personalized education.
“The winter feast allows everyone to share, be together and appreciate everyone’s uniqueness, so in that way we really look forward to group events,” said Gordon.
