Scotiabank showed its support for Greentree School’s breakfast program and donated $100 to the fund.
At the presentation are (l-r) Angie Gill and Patti Rische-Cole of Scotiabank, Doreen Oliver of the breakfast program and Randi Schmidt of Scotiabank.

The best way for students to have a great day is to start it with a good breakfast, and the breakfast program at Greentree School is striving to meet this need.

The program last year was serving in the area of 80 kids at the school. While it has always been run on shoe-string budget, volunteer Doreen Oliver says it is even tougher in this recent economic climate to get donations.

“I believe in this program and feel strongly about it, she tells The Mail. “Teachers confirm that kids learn better, and they can concentrate on their work.”

 Each year she canvasses local businesses with a letter solicit support. Recently she has not been receiving as many responses, often in the industrial sector. Many of the offices she says are field offices and often not staffed full time and that could contribute to it.

All is not lost. She has been able to get some support and she is grateful Bonnie Polych of B&P Trucking and Ian Cassels of Re/Max both contributed $500. She is also grateful for continued support from O’Sheas’s Restaurant, which contributes paper plates, spoons and forks, and also Canalta, which helps to supply fresh fruit.

 She asks that if others wish to support the program they can contact Greentree School at 403-823-5244 to learn more.

Staff at RBC showed its support for Greentree School’s breakfast program and donated in all $125 to the fund.
(l-r) Doreen Oliver accepts the donations from Elaine Piwin, Jennifer Dickson, Ashleigh Patrosh, Nathan Fleming and Eileen Herron.

Ascent Financial showed its support for Greentree School’s breakfast program with a donation. (l-r) Julia Bertamini, Sayaka Schmidt, Flo  Moffat and Karen Gough present the donation to Doreen Oliver.
mailphotos by Patrick Kolafa

With the Tough Mudder event taking place this past weekend, the RCMP helped to keep residents safe, directing traffic, and even got a few phone calls about people being stuck in the mud.

RCMP Drumheller Corporal Kevin Charles said the event went well from the RCMP point-of-view.

“We had extra members working just dedicated to Tough Mudder to help out with the traffic control and from a public safety aspect,” he said. 

He noted to The Mail that even though there was an increase in registrations this year, numbers were down because of the weather. 

“The only real rural problem was the parking on Saturday. They used that big field as a parking lot for general parking, and with all the rain, obviously it just became a real mud hole,” he said. 

“Tough Mudder was very, very well organized. They have contingency plans for everything, anything possible could go wrong and they have plans for it. In this case, they realized okay, vehicles are getting stuck so they had contracts ready to go for towing and vehicle removal, which included farm machinery and tow trucks, so it worked,” Charles explained. 

“We helped out with traffic control on the Institutional road and it was slow going but we got everybody out,” he said, mentioning that many members of the public were getting “frustrated and upset” and were calling the police about being stuck in the field. 

  “At the end of the day that is not a police issue. We are there to help out with traffic control and we just urged everyone to be patient, we aren’t going to leave anyone abandoned in a field, the tows would get to them eventually, and they did,” he said.

“A lot of the participants were laughing, having fun. There were groups of them taking turns pushing each other out, they had fun with it, but there were some who wanted to go home to a hot shower and they were stuck,” he said, continuing by adding that he wouldn’t want a parking issue to overshadow the whole weekend. 

“It was a great weekend, great experience. There were no issues, everyone was there to have fun and I think the parking was just a minimallittle road bump, which they overcame. Again that contributed to the extreme well planning and professionalism of the Tough Mudder crew,” he said.