East Stroudsburg hosted a Borough Beautification Day at Dansbury Park on September 20, 2025. It’s a day when the community comes together to try to clean up the local area.

The National Honor Society (NHS) at Stroudsburg High School (SHS) offered more than 30 spots for its members to volunteer, with 29 members signed up and made a difference that day.

East Stroudsburg University (ESU) also had two of its fraternities helping out; some of them were past Stroudsburg graduates.

At the volunteering site, the mayor of East Stroudsburg, Victor A. Brozusky, gave a commencement speech and thanked everyone for coming out.

Aryanna Vidaic, ‘26, “Volunteering at the Beautification Day event was a great way for our school to help better the community.”

There were two ways to help out: either pick up trash in the park and around the area, or paint the picnic tables at the park.

NHS was split up into two groups and worked hard from 8:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. Half of the NHS and the ESU group painted the blue picnic tables orange. The other half of both groups went to pick up trash.

While the painting group made the park look prettier, the rest of the community went to pick up trash around the borough.

Kiesha Leonard, ‘27, one of the students on trash duty, exclaimed, “I had a lot of fun cleaning up the environment, and it was really nice to see so many people come together to help.”

On the group’s expedition around the borough, Leonard managed to pick up more than 500 pieces of trash over the span of a couple of hours. The event helped shed light on the severity of the littering problem the world faces now.

Kelly Lewis, the Borough manager of East Stroudsburg, shared in an interview with the Mountaineer, “I’m so glad that the Stroudsburg National Honor Society came and helped out today. The one thing we have is you don’t realize how much trash is along the roads and streets until you actually get out there with a garbage bag, and you can fill garbage bags pretty quickly.”

He has been the Borough Manager for a year now, and back in May, they picked up 92 “big” bags of garbage. He was expecting the same, if not more, bags from this time around.

Lewis is hopeful that their next Beautification Day will be around April, and then another one around this time next year. NHS members are excited to go back and make a difference next spring.