A LESSON IN NATURE AND GARDENING

The gardens at Forest Hill Elementary School, the largest one in Harford County, is close to completion, while work is just beginning on the garden at Hickory Elementary School.

 

The gardens, done in conjunction with the Harford County Department of Public Works and the Master Gardeners, are aimed not only at educating students, but also at preserving the environment, Andrew Cassilly, conservation resource manager for the school system, said.

 

Both schools are designated green schools, and the gardens are part of that designation. 

 

Harford County has 22 designated green schools by the Maryland Association for Environmental and Outdoor Education. It’s all part of moving toward sustainability, Cassilly said. "Sustainability as we define it, is operating in such a fashion that the next generation has at least as good an atmosphere and chance to prosper as this generation," he said. "We’re trying to integrate that in all subject areas. We’re trying to help kids understand the concepts we’re trying

to teach in school."

 

"The purpose of involving the students was to include them in a real world work experience in problem solving and introduce them to a variety of environmental professionals. Nearly all of the native plants that the students will plant in the garden were selected by them," Christine Buckley, the project manager who works for the county’s public works department, wrote in an email. Those concepts include water conservation, groundwater runoff, pollution and the value of

certain species, like good bugs and bad bugs.

 

The garden at Forest Lakes is in front of the school, in a low-lying culvert that handles a lot of stormwater runoff, Cassilly said. The garden is designed to slow the runoff, giving it time to seep into the ground and prevent the runoff from carrying sediment into streams and subsequently into the bay. In the gardens at Forest Hill and Hickory, as in other rain gardens at Harford schools, the plants are designed to be very low maintenance, Cassilly said, since they will need to able to sustain

themselves throughout the summer. Some gardens include butterfly bushes to attract certain insects or certain plants to attract hummingbirds; others, if the soil is damp, include swamp grasses.

 

Part of the curriculum and the project is working with the master gardeners to test the soil to see what plants will work best in the garden’s location. Because the green certification is part of the schools’ curriculum, all students participate in some

form or another. "Our fifth-grade students have been instrumental in the design process of the rain garden. As fourth-graders, the students researched information about the importance of rain gardens. The students talked about the how a rain garden is constructed and the vegetation that would thrive in our geographic area," Tammy Bosley, Forest Lakes’ principal, wrote in an email. The goal is to one day get all schools to be green, Cassilly said. "I would love that," he said, "but the process is extensive. It’s not an easy task. It would be up to the school to decide if they want to go through that."

They may not all apply for certification, but they would be doing things "greener" than they are.

 

"Moving toward sustainability as a system, from an educational standpoint, it’s important to practice what we teach," Cassilly said. "We’re telling kids they need to conserve natural resources, reduce waste, by operating sustainably. We’re telling them this is what you need to do, and we do it." It’s important, he said, to prepare students for the society they will be living in, and society as a whole, is getting greener and greener. 

 

"We need to get our kids ready to enter that world," he said

 

Matt Button

AEGIS Staff

May/2011