School spotlight: CECI in the community

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By Benjamin Reffell

When you were young, you might remember going to the Santa Claus parade. This is a shared part of our childhood many of us treasure, and it’s amazing to look back on these moments as we move on to different chapters of our lives. Thankfully, this tradition is still going strong, as St. Thomas held its 33rd annual Santa Claus parade Saturday.

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School spotlight: CECI in the community Back to video

As always, despite our city’s modest population size, there wasn’t a short supply of impressive floats. Among these included one of CECI’s very own, which students helped create on Friday. It was a Christmas-themed explosion in the best way possible. To complement this, the school marching band followed closely behind, sporting matching jerseys that screamed Titan pride. They managed to persevere despite the frigid weather and were great the entire night.

Overall, it was extremely successful, but this isn’t the only way CECI has been contributing to the community. As a Central Elgin student, I know that there’s always something going on that has an impact on our community. Currently, CECI is doing the Toasty Toes campaign that encourages students to bring in a pair of socks to donate to the less fortunate members of Railway City.

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Central also makes an effort to spread awareness in the school, and, by extension, the St. Thomas community. On breast cancer awareness day, CECI held a bake sale and a buy-out walk for a cure, the proceeds of both going to breast cancer research.

More recently, CECI has been hanging up posters for the Transgender Day of Remembrance detailing the dishearteningly frequent murders of trans people.

CECI’s contributions are not only limited to our local municipality, though. Later this year, Central will be participating in the Inside Ride, which is both tons of fun and for a great cause. All fundraising money collected from the event is donated to organizations that provide financial aid and conduct research for those affected by childhood cancer.

CECI puts an immense amount of effort into community involvement, but we are only a piece of the puzzle when it comes to making St. Thomas the best place it can be. Only with everyone’s immense contributions and hard work could we provide new possibilities and new moments for others to treasure and look back on.