Louis Adams

Lauderdale, 5th Grade

If I was mayor of my town, Lauderdale, MN for a day I would help my community with pie. You might be asking yourself, “How could pie help?” Well, our community is very small and not well known, but pie could make Lauderdale famous.

You see, there aren’t many people in our town and some people live nearby and don’t even know about Lauderdale. As mayor, I would make an event called Pie Fest. The town’s bakers can sign up to compete for the title, “Lauderdale’s Best Pie Baker.”

The main event would be the pie baking competition. Lots of people will come and enjoy the pies and we will even have games and food. Lots of people will come from miles around and get to know each other and you could even make a new friend. People might even want to move here after seeing our beautiful town.

As mayor, I will let all the citizens decide on what we do with all the money gathered at Pie Fest. I will invite all citizens to a meeting to share ideas and vote on their favorite. Not only will people enjoy pie, have fun, and make friends, the money raised will go to a great cause that the citizens care about. With Pie Fest, the Twin Cities might even want to add Lauderdale and become the Triplet Cities.

Grace Carlson

Dilworth, 5th Grade

Hi, I’m Grace, and I’m ten years old. I’m in fifth grade at DGF middle school. I love Dilworth, but I want other people to see why I love it. These are the things I would do to make Dilworth change for the better.

If I were mayor for a day, I would start clubs to help our environment, such as clubs to plan gardens and clean the city. For the Garden Club, we would meet three times a week at someone’s house and help them plant a garden! Gardens take a while to plant, so we would have to have at least ten people there at a time. For the Cleaning the City Club, people could clean their streets and the parks around them. Anybody can volunteer to help clean their community.

Another thing I would do is encourage more people to come to Dilworth. We could build a hotel so people wouldn’t have to stay in Fargo when they’re visiting friends and family. We would need something to make them want to stay in that hotel, so here’s my idea.

The city could build a splash pad for the kids. It would have two small slides and two bigger slides. It would also have two spraying tubes that spray water from the top of the playground and talk tubes so friends can talk to each other from across the park. I know these things would take time to build, but I hope we can get them started. I can’t wait to see the town of Dilworth change for the better.

Janette Cerda Juarez

Windom, 4th Grade

I would make our safety better by having an emergency button in all houses because our safety matters. What that button will do is send your location and your emergency to police officers, the fire department, the hospital, and many more important people. Also we would need that button because if a child didn’t have a phone or device to tell people they had an emergency they could press the button if needed. But if a child pressed the button by accident the important people would hear around the area of the house to check if there was actually an emergency.

Lastly, I would have a fundraiser to build a toddler-friendly park for toddlers under the age of 4. Other parks are not really made for toddlers and other parks are made out of metal. They could hit their head or they could be too high to reach, so if I could build a toddler-friendly park I would make it out of metal but I would put foam all over it. I would also make it easy to reach.

That’s what I would do if I was mayor.

Charlotte Haussner

Grand Marais, 5th Grade

Have you ever wished that you could recycle more? If I were mayor for a day, I would try to improve one thing about our city: I would improve recycling. We don’t have an easy way for people to recycle so many people just throw it away. I want to improve it because a lot of people put their recycling in their garbage cans, which is not only bad for humans, but also very bad for the environment. I think that when we recycle, we are preventing harm to nature.

In our area, people have to drive many miles into town to do their recycling, and some people don’t have the ability to get to the recycling center. I would improve the recycling by setting up a program to pick up the recycling from house to house, maybe not to pick up every week, but once or twice a month just to start. Once we have more people participating, they could pick it up once a week. Everyone who wants their recycling to be picked up has to pay a small fee. I think many people would want this service and would be willing to pay for it.

In conclusion, I think that a pick-up recycling program improvement would help the people of Grand Marais and the whole area participate more in recycling, which is good for the environment and really important to me.