DAGUPAN CITY: For planting mangroves and providing new habitats for fish, a public high school in this coastal city in Pangasinan won the top prize for environmental action in the World’s Best School Prizes.
The Bonuan Boquig National High School (BBNHS) in Barangay Bonuan Boquig here bested the International School of Zug & Luzern of Zug, Switzerland and Green School of Bali, Indonesia, the two other finalists in the competition’s Environmental Action category.
The Environmental Action Prize recognizes the importance of youth, students and schools in climate action that engage with solutions for global warming and climate crisis.
Mayor Belen Fernandez congratulated the school’s officials, teachers and students “for being an inspiration to us all and for making it this far in this eco-friendly international competition for environmentalists.”
“I wish for many more opportunities like this to come to inspire other schools, organizations and institutions in Dagupan to carry out their conservation initiatives for our environment,” Fernandez said in a social media post.
BBNHS won $50,000 for its feat.
The school’s winning entry was its Mangrove Planting Project, which was launched in 2010, a year after Dagupan City was devastated by a massive flooding that also destroyed hundreds of hectares of bangus (milkfish) ponds, the people’s main source of livelihood.
Patches of mangroves also began disappearing from the river banks near the school, threatening the loss of the natural fish habitat in the area.
To address the problem, the BBNHS launched a mangrove planting activity to revitalize the river.
Since then, it has planted about 50,000 mangrove seedlings in the area.
In 2012, under the leadership of Maria Linda Ventenilla, the school principal at the time, and now chief of the curriculum implementation division of the City Schools Division, the mangrove planting activity was expanded to include coastal clean-up, waste management, tree planting the green camp.
BBNHS principal Renato Santillan said the $50,000 cash prize they won will be used to build a mangrove nursery.
The World’s Best School Prizes was launched in 2021 by T4 Education, a global organization committed to providing engaging tools, initiatives and events for teachers to improve education.
Aside from Environmental Action, the other categories of the World Best School Prizes are Community Collaboration, Innovation, Overcoming Adversity and Supporting Healthy Lives.
Other winners were Dunoon Grammar School in Scotland, United Kingdom (community collaboration), Escuela Emilia Lascar in Penaflor, Chile (innovation), Project Shelter Wakadogo in Gulu, Uganda (overcoming adversity) and Curie Metropolitan High School in Chicago, Illinois (supporting healthy lives).