Hoover High keeping its campus wild
Environmental science teachers Janet Ort and Kevin Butler want to make sure their students don’t forget about Hoover High School’s wild neighbors. This year, the pair started on a project to make sure Alabama’s wildlife has a home on the school campus.
Around the school’s southwest entrance to campus on Buccaneer Drive, the signs of local wildlife are evident: a songbird resting on a tree branch, bees clustering over spring flowers and a tuft of fur left behind by a deer. Some species, called pollinators, are crucial to the survival of plants in the area.
“When we think of pollinators, bees are the first thing that come to mind. But pollinators are bats and moths, some butterflies and bees of course, but they’re very important to agriculture, to our trees, to everything working at the right time,” Ort said.
Ort and Butler want to build a pollinator garden at that entrance to campus. This year, they started with a basic design for the garden and the planting of 20 red oak saplings. However, Butler imagines this as a 15-year or more project with a variety of native species, bird and insect nesting sites, educational signs and a sculpture of the school’s initials covered in climbing vines.
“Any time you can get kids outside the classroom to see a true application of what we’ve been talking about, then it just enhances their education,” Butler said. “We can have a long and lasting impact, and they can see the transition over time.”
Ort said the pollinator garden will be a chance for students to see concepts brought from the environmental science classroom to life. The teachers want this to be a student-led project that can cross over to projects with engineering and art students to complete the garden.
The garden can be a place to educate family and community members, and for students to come back and visit after they graduate, Butler said. There will be opportunities for students to work in the garden not only in class, but also in summer service hours or the “adoption” of a particular area to monitor throughout the year.
Work will continue on building the pollinator garden next school year, though the timeline is determined in part by whether Ort and Butler receive grants or donations to get the supplies they need. So far, some of their help has included Aldridge Gardens, Birmingham Botanical Gardens and the Green Footprints Project.
The pollinator garden will be the most visible project, but Ort and Butler have plans to use other parts of the Hoover High campus for classroom learning. In preparation for new roads being built in the Stadium Trace area, a section of forest across the street from the garden has been cut down. Butler said they plan to observe this area to learn how woodland regenerates after being disturbed.
There is also a nearby retention pond that filters water before it feeds into the Cahaba River, and Ort said this area has become a habitat of its own for herons, geese, kingfishers, hawks, fish and more species, particularly during migration. She plans to install bat boxes, wood duck nesting boxes and bird-attracting plant species to encourage the growth of this habitat.
“This has become a wildlife area, and we want to add to this flora,” Ort said.
Hoover’s environmental science students will gain much more from walking outside to learn about forestry, erosion and other concepts than they would watching a video in the classroom, Butler said. He wants it to instill lifelong lessons about the importance of caring for the local ecosystem.
“It gives them an opportunity to see real-world situations in a local community,” Butler said. “They’ll know how to apply some of those things and have a sense of meaning and purpose.”
Ort said she wants to remove political issues from studying the local environment, and show her students that humans can choose to have a positive effect on their community’s wild plants and animals.
“‘How can we make it better?’ That habit of mind and that practice is really important as a citizen,” Ort said.