McLean’s UNICEF Club held an after school clean-up on March 13 in hopes of promoting environmentally sustainable activities ahead of Earth Month.

“We finished the meeting by going around the school and picking up trash around the courtyards, the parking lots and behind the stairs,” sophomore Julie Daniel said.

UNICEF Club members split into groups in order to reach more areas during the activity. This project also aided school janitors as they are continuously working hard to ensure students and faculty at McLean have a clean learning environment.

“The [trash pick-up] demonstrated how much trash [students] leave around,” senior Kylie Nguyen said. “It also [showed students] how to fix our school’s [image] and how much work the janitors do for us [each day].”

This upcoming April, UNICEF will hold different activities that support a more environmentally sustainable planet and raise funds for children in need.

“April is Earth Month and although UNICEF doesn’t specifically focus on environmental issues, we still feel as if there are environmental issues that affect children throughout the world that are important to bring light to,” Daniel said.

During Earth Month, the club is planning to paint the rock in commemoration of Earth Day which takes place on April 22, to further raise environmental awareness at McLean.

“[UNICEF] does this every year, as a kind of a tradition, to bring awareness to help keep the Earth clean and healthy,” Nguyen said. “The Earth has been deteriorating and going through a lot of [issues] because of the ignorance of humans, so we want to bring awareness to those environmental problems.”