At DGN, the peace garden will be placed right in the middle of an extremely busy area, the Forest St. entrance. Before and after school, many students get dropped off and picked up at this entrance.

Parents are frustrated from waiting in line, horns honk and cars speed to exit school grounds, sometimes getting into accidents. How can a place with so much disturbance be peaceful?
Students, staff and community members cannot relax, or enjoy this area when there is a constant flow of people coming in and out of the building. Even throughout the day students are going home sick, or leaving early through these doors.

Students would have to either come early enough to school when no one is getting dropped off at Forest, so earlier than seven, or come to the peace garden after everyone has gone home to be able to appreciate the tribute to our veterans.

The goal was to finish the peace garden by Memorial Day, and start building about two weeks prior.

This means construction will begin during the school year. For at least two weeks, students will not be able to be dropped off at these doors.

If it is completed on time and students are not studying furiously for finals, before summer vacation and graduation, they will have all of three days to enjoy the garden; leaving the area surrounding the peace garden desolate and unused when summer begins.

A better alternative to starting the project in May, would be to start the project over the summer. There wouldn’t be as much of a rush to finish, and the builders would not be disrupted by students trying to enter the building.

In addition to changing the start date of the project, the administration should consider a new area to construct the garden.

A better alternative to the Forest entrance and the secondary option, Main St., would have been in the DGN courtyard, however with the new master plan, this option is no longer available and would not have been accesible to the rest of the members of the community.

A second alternative would be the area to the left of the Forest St. Circle. This large grassy area near the bike racks could be more secluded with the plants being donated from Grant and Power Landscaping Inc, acting as a screen.

It is close enough to where students can access it before and after school, but out of the way of traffic.

Students with bikes and those who walk home can pass through daily, without the hustle and bustle of traffic directly next to them.

This place would be easier for the construction to be done on, because the builders would not have to take out all the stones in the middle of the Forest circle, and instead could build on top of the grass. This would save the builders money, considering they are doing the project pro-bono.

No matter where the committee decides to place it, the current options ensure the peace garden is in no state to be peaceful or relaxing, and ultimately the garden will be too busy for students and community members to enjoy it.

There is a better and cheaper way to construct the peace garden that the administration at DGN and the committee should take into serious consideration.