Nelly Furtado Goes Back To School To Turn Off The Lights.
Canadian pop-star Nelly Furtado joins parents and students at Toronto’s Maurice Cody Public School to film a short public service announcement promoting the school’s ‘Turn Off The Lights’ program.
At 10:30 every weekday morning, student volunteers at Maurice Cody Public School play the chorus to Nelly Furtado’s song Turn Off the Lights over the school’s P.A. system. This daily “announcement” serves as a reminder to students and staff to turn off all unnecessary lights around them.
And that’s pretty well all there is to Maurice Cody’s Turn Off the Lights program! But since the program’s start in 2003, the school has significantly reduced its energy use, which means that it has also significantly reduced its contribution to greenhouse gas emissions (greenhouse gases are released into the air by power plants that create the energy we use to power our schools and homes).
To further encourage classes to adopt the habit of turning off lights they don’t need, the Lights Off Squad—a student-team of young energy auditors—scatters out around the school each week to see how each class is doing. Grade 3 teacher Bev Bruce then uses the audit as a math exercise, with students tracking each classroom's lighting habits on a colour-coded chart over the course of the school year.
To promote the program to other schools, Maurice Cody Public School decided to produce a thirty-second public service announcement, and they were able to get Nelly Furtado to co-star in it!
Directed and produced by parents, and starring students from the school, the video shows how easy it is to help the environment.
Maurice Cody Public School, located in the Bayview and Eglinton area, is one of the Toronto District School Board’s top energy saving schools and has received gold medals from the Board for several of its ecology initiatives.
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